


Through a Glass Darkly

by sevendials



Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Angst, Gen, Horror, M/M, Psychological Torture, Strong Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-27
Updated: 2009-07-27
Packaged: 2017-10-11 13:27:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendials/pseuds/sevendials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ken can only be himself, and he isn't sure he likes it. Lost and alone with nothing to hold onto but memories, Ken is about to find out that a man's worst enemies can be the ones he creates himself, and the past isn't anywhere near as dead as he thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Valley of the Shadow of Death](https://archiveofourown.org/works/113698) by [Rokesmith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rokesmith/pseuds/Rokesmith). 



> Standard Disclaimer: Is standard. Weiss Kreuz belongs to Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya, Project Weiss, TV Tokyo and no doubt several other entities that I have either forgotten about or never heard of. This is a fan work written purely for fun, I make no profit and mean no offense.
> 
> Author's Notes: This is a story of two distinct halves, each with their own distinct character. The original plan – to try and turn both halves into a single whole – would have resulted in something very schizophrenic indeed, and thus was very quickly shelved for being too stupid. The second approach initially involved my writing both sides of the story, but it became clear that this wasn't going to be feasible either if the fic was going to be finished this side of the Last Trump. To that end the less, um, _experimental_ side of the proceedings has been more than ably handled by Rokesmith in his fanfiction _The Valley of the Shadow of Death_. Both stories can be read as stand-alone works, but reading both provides a far completer understanding of the story as a whole.
> 
> There's a slight research error in this fic as it stands, as I didn't know how different Protestant and Catholic Bibles could get. I realized after finishing the first chapter I should have been using Catholic Bibles - however, some of the verses I used read so differently in the Douay-Rheims and New Jerusalem versions they looked odd in context. I've therefore decided I'd far rather the verses used in this fic, most of which were chosen because they were extremely well-known, sounded familiar than were strictly doctrinally accurate.
> 
> Warnings: This fic involves live burial. It is consequently **extremely** dark and contains themes some readers may find very troubling. Rated for language and implied physical and sexual abuse.

**in a wood, astray**

_Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death._

The story began, as stories did tend to, with a woman. With Manx, calm and proud and dour, stood in the basement flipping out the lights: the story began with a mission. There was always a mission. A mission and a target – how many times had heard _that_ one? – and a mistake, a simple one, and the mistake was his own.

And sudden pain, then darkness. Another basement room stinking of old blood and disinfectant, not enough of it, and of someone else's stale fear; things, shapeless and ugly and glistening even in the darkness, as if they would be unpleasantly moist to the touch, if he could only have walked to them and placed a hand against them. Things that he couldn't put a name to and gleaming trays full of… full of _stuff_, and the target, smiling. There'd been a mistake, a simple one – and mistakes, in his business, always got paid for one way or another.

That had been before. He didn't like to think about before. Which left him what? Just trapped alone in the shadows and how, oh how was this any better?

_Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee._

He was cold, he was cramped, he was shivering. Ken Hidaka didn't think he'd ever felt more frightened in his life.

Lying still and silent, the breath catching in his throat and his eyes tightly closed for fear of what he might see when he opened them, he tried not to think. He thought, quite carefully, of nothing at all. (Of a field, quite empty, of long grass whispering in the wind and the sun… _no_. No, that wasn't going to help.) He counted his breaths: one, three, nine—Ken tried to force himself to calm.

To think only of nothing. Not where he was and what was happening to him, and not that he was going to die. Not the dampness in the air, not the smell – he could barely move or even lift his head and all fighting had done was exhaust him, leaving his hands bruised and painfully throbbing, aching so badly when he tried to move his fingers he was sure he must have seriously hurt himself. There was nothing he could do and no way to save himself: no way out, apart from one. He could only lie there, laid out as if he were already dead… he wouldn't think about that, either.

_Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus._

"Holy Mary mother of God—"

He felt something inside him _give_. Help me, oh God help me—Ken was screaming. Wordlessly, hysterically and he hardly knew why when there was nobody to hear him and it helped nothing. He knew he should stop, but he couldn't. Trapped and alone and so afraid he could hardly think, he was just screaming.

He opened his eyes and there was nothing. Darkness closed round him, darkness like a shroud, so intense and so unbroken his eyes could get no purchase upon it. He might have torn out his own eyes and not known it…

_Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death._

This might, Ken thought, have been what it was like to be dead if only there were no such thing as Hell.

**for you are with me**

One of Ken's biggest secrets was that had been scared of the dark until he was almost eleven. Now, nine years down the line and lying alone in darkness so thick he felt he would choke on it, he thought about fear.

Could a man grow used to fear? If any man could have learned to simply live with it Ken thought that man should have been him, and if only it had worked that way! If only it had been that simple – but fear, like pain, never could be remembered properly. Shouldn't he have been used to this by now? He should have been able to cope with a game whose name was simply terror—

(Cope? With _this_?) I'm scared, Ken thought. Oh God. _I'm scared_…

Yet fear alone shouldn't have been enough to break him. There'd been the fire after all, though that had happened far too quickly for Ken to realize he should have been afraid. He'd barely had time for surprise, never mind fear… there'd been confusion, then agony. Nothing more. All right – though it hadn't been the same thing, not in the slightest – then before that: the weeks of suspicion and his own incomprehension, and terror, and desperate shame.

(Why the Hell shame? Why anything? _I didn't do it_.)

There'd been Kase – but he hadn't been frightened then, just angry and sad. He should have let it go, trusted in God…

There'd been his mother but he'd been five then, far too young to understand what he was seeing: all he had known at the time was that what he was seeing was bad. His mother was sick and his sisters were scared, and everything was changing so far and so fast that the world would never be the same again. Ken had watched her dragging herself, inch by agonizing inch, to her slow, undignified death, and had wished he wasn't so small.

There'd been (he didn't like to think of it) the first time he had killed. He couldn't remember the man's name any more. It had been something ridiculously common, something like Kondo or Sato or Ito, or maybe it was Ando. Something like that. He just couldn't remember, that was all, but somehow he felt he should have done and it shamed him that he didn't. He'd botched it, badly; his hands had been shaking, he'd been almost more afraid than his victim. Ken had ripped the man's stomach open and watched, wide-eyed and frozen in horror, as he bled to death on his office floor, and then Omi had congratulated him and he'd had to ask Manx to stop the car so he could throw up on the verge. God forgive me, he had thought, Oh, God, forgive me…

All the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, he'd been convinced the world could see his sin on his face. He'd jumped at the sound of the phone or the chime of the door, he'd waited for someone to come and take him away and lock him up, and hang him – and here he was almost three years on, still guilty, still fearful, still waiting.

There'd been that day when Aya, God damn him, stupid fucking _Aya_ had dropped comm. in the middle of a mission then, with the target dead and the police on the prowl, hadn't been there at the rendezvous. We've got to _go_, Omi had said, flames illuminating his face and his quiet voice almost lost beneath the clamor of sirens too close at hand… five and a half bastard hours he'd sat up, counting off the hours and wishing he'd been better, that he'd never wished Aya gone still less dead—five hours and then the next morning there Aya was, pale and pissy-looking as ever and strolling in for his shift like he'd never been gone at all, and Ken had grabbed him by the collar and punched him in the jaw.

There'd been… Christ, there'd been so _much_! So much it embarrassed him. Call yourself a man, Ken Hidaka?

There'd been so many times he'd caught himself wondering if he had ever, _ever_ felt more frightened in his life than he felt at that moment. So many times that this – just lying alone in darkness – couldn't possibly have been the worst of it. It just _couldn't_, not with so much to choose from. Once upon a time he must have felt more frightened than he did now.

The only trouble with that (hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee, jesusmaryand_joseph_ get me out of here, get me _out_ of here God, _please!_) the problem was that he couldn't for the life of him remember when.

**burn after reading**

Which of course changed nothing. It didn't even make him feel less afraid. Trapped sure as an unwanted kitten in a burlap bag and nothing to do but claw at the confines of his tiny prison, and cry, and wait for the inevitable, there was only one thing left for Ken to hope for, yet it was the one thing he didn't even dare to dream of.

Nobody was coming. Weiss killed and that was where the story ended, and if all he could do (he, the dumbass who'd been made in the first place; if he couldn't even manage a simple tail job without getting himself read within minutes, carried off and caught, what the Hell did he think was the _point_ of him?) if all there was left for him was to wait for a rescue, it was all up. They went in, they got the target, they went home… he hadn't known it at first but it was the going home that was the hard part. Any fool, or so Manx had once told him, could kill a man: it was a mistake to think that Persia would want assassins simply to murder. He wanted them to get away with it…

The job came first. It had to.

It would have been the same if this had been, say, Youji's fuckup. It would be the same for anybody's. Game over, thanks for playing; the secretary will disavow all knowledge. Weiss were murderers, just that. They didn't do salvage jobs. Why call on a killer to keep you safe and whole, to save your life? That's dumb, Kenken, even for you.

Which meant he was on his own.

Which meant he was going to die.

**one of five**

Sometimes, they wouldn't believe in a word of it. They would laugh and glance about themselves as if they expected any minute to see a hidden camera, or for someone to jump out from behind a door. Surprised? I had you going for a second there… When life was a lucid nightmare, what was there to do but smile and wait to wake?

(—and what if none of this is real? maybe it's a game and they're trying to scare me, they're showing me something damn near unbearable and watching me freak and any minute now – any minute _please _God – they'll pull you away and say it again: so, Kenken, do you have anything you'd like to tell us? They need me alive, they need me sane, keep telling yourself that, this is no good to anybody if it leaves me dead or so fucked over I might as well be so maybe it's just a head trip, some stupid _psychological_ shit and they never took me anywhere and I'm not underground at all—)

Sometimes, Ken would try the same trick, but it never really worked for him.

He had no reason to believe that he wasn't exactly where they'd said he'd be. The air, damp and close and chilly, was wrong and the sound, oh Christ! the sound when he beat against the wood before him was wrong. He could smell the earth about him, feel the weight of it bearing down upon the tiny box he lay in.

There was no need for the target to make up anything when the truth was so much more terrible.

(—what if none of this is real? maybe it's a nightmare and I can wake up from it, perhaps the briefing – Christ, those poor kids! – gave me bad dreams, God knows it's happened before and it always gets so much worse when there's children involved. Jesus fuck, what those boys must have gone through! Maybe the next time I open my eyes I'll wake up and this will all be over and the mission won't even have begun and I won't even _remember_ what I dreamed of, I'll just know to be careful—)

Except his eyes were open. Ken would never have dreamed of this when even his nightmares were unmemorable.

Ken never had been a good liar, not even when he was lying to himself. His lies were too convenient, too good to be true, and the truth too cruel and too plain. This was real and he was trapped: they'd buried him alive, and left him. Oh God, Ken thought as he stared into the blackness before him, oh God, oh God, _what am I going to do_?

**particular judgment**

The room had been too dark, yet too bright. There were trays of sharp, shining things, things designed to cut or gouge or tear, and shapeless, twisted forms lurked in the shadows by the walls like horror movie monsters waiting to spring, yet the target – just another smirking nobody, a bland, business-suited middle-aged nonentity like so many of the men who had already met their deaths at Ken's hands – was the thing he couldn't take his eyes off. The target, with his tight little smile and his boring suit, had been the most frightening thing of all.

They'd stripped him bare, tied him down and hurt him and asked him again to talk: _you're gonna have to do better than that_, Ken had said, so they had done.

God almighty. He had a knack for getting himself into these fucking ridiculous situations, an utter fucking _knack_. Way to go, Hidaka, too busy trying to be _brave_ to realize all bravery would be to a psycho like the target was a challenge. He should have had the sense to make like pain alone would have broken him. Ken should have given them – he didn't know. A little. Pleas and feigned tears and half a handful of truth. Something next to useless, some blind alley the target could blithely chase down. Something – _anything_ – that would make them think they'd been getting to him.

Anything, as long as it bought him time. Time to think or to find an exit, or make one… time enough for the others to find him, or to find the target. Ken didn't care if he fell, as long as he took his murderer with him.

Just as long as he didn't break first.

Don't break, Hidaka. Whatever you do, for the love of God just _don't break_. The minute you do—

**18:22**

"Because you're going to talk eventually."

The target sounded merely disinterested and, in his disinterest, almost benign. Harmless even… he spoke as if this had nothing whatever to do with him and it was a lie, like the smart suit he hid behind and his placid half-smile. Just another dark beast playing at blamelessness and already his words seemed gratuitous. Of course Ken was going to talk: they both knew that. It was just a matter of when, and what he would say when he did: _I don't know how to lie…_

"You're going to talk," the target said again, and it wasn't a threat or even a promise. It was just – just _there_, a simple statement. "You know that as well as I do. Why not save us all a lot of time and trouble?"

(Save yourself the pain. Just tell me who you work for: maybe then I'll end it quickly.)

Ken smiled because he didn't know what else he should do. He thought of the others: a cheerful, crowded little corner store and Youji idling by the register doing nothing at all and Aya, in his own way, doing barely more than Youji, and Omi smiling and shoving the nearest flower he could find at a girl who seemed down… He said, "Can I help you?"

He had expected anger. The target merely sighed. Closing his eyes, he shook his head, weary as a father saddened by the obstinacy of his child. The hard way, then.

"Very well. If you change your mind at any point, do let me know."

Later: bruised and aching inside and out, Ken lay on his side and concentrated only on the cold. It was better than the _why_ of it or admitting, guiltily, to his fear and how much he wished he were at home, or dreaming of a rescue he knew better than to believe would come. It must have been dawn, or nearly so. A key scraped in the lock; he raised his head, fighting down a sudden surge of panic. The target stood before him looking clean and sleek and well-rested, dressed far too smartly and smelling faintly of some expensive cologne. This is a sedative, he'd said, holding up the syringe like this was some stupid object lesson. When you wake up, we will have buried you alive. Now, do you have anything you'd like to tell me?

Ken had laughed. He must have looked terrified. He said, fuck off. You're wasting your time.

Oh, said the target, I don't think so…

I'm not an unreasonable man—the truly horrifying thing was that the target had said it like he meant it. Certainly they'd left him water, and given him a blanket: they hadn't had to do that and _if you think you might want to change your mind_, the target had said, _now would be the time to do so._ And the sudden sting of the needle.

(Or shall we ask you again in a few hours?)

But that was for later. Now the target was bending to him and there was a hand on his brow smoothing his hair and he couldn't move, fuck it! _he couldn't move—_

Ken knew what this man did, and (so much for Siberian) he knew himself helpless in the face of it. It should have been appalling, should have left him revolted and terrified—and yet, though Ken struggled and bit back a curse and fought frantically and hopelessly against the restraints, somehow it no longer seemed to matter very much. He was dead anyway and before he died he would talk. Who cared how he got there, how it happened?

"Welcome," Ken said: the words had no meaning for him. "Can I help you?"

Don't, the target murmured, be afraid to scream.

**the path leads downward**

An abandoned child learned early that they could rely on nobody. Born to betrayal, Ken understood painfully well that every time he put his faith in something – in his family, in friends, in God or God knew what; the _why_ of it hardly mattered – it turned out to have been woefully misplaced and yet he never stopped believing. He kept trying, kept hoping that maybe next time it would all work out: it changed nothing.

He'd tried to trust in his family; now Ken clung to his friends because there was nobody else left to cling to, and hoped like Hell they didn't know it. Despair would have been easier than hope in the face of experience.

Abandonment shouldn't still have surprised him.

He shouldn't have still been hoping that maybe this time, maybe _just this once_ it would be different.

(Of course there was no reason why it should have been, except that he wanted it more than anything. Except Ken didn't want to die, not here, not like this! and wasn't it about time he had someone – _anyone_! – he could believe in? Ken was tired of thinking of himself as disposable; just another parentless child, another infinitely replaceable cog in the machine. A face in the crowd and not even a remarkable one, plenty more where he came from. Just once in his life Ken wanted to be missed for himself, and not for what he could do…)

That changed nothing either. They might miss him terribly and wish him back, might hate his inevitable replacement for no reason other than they weren't him, but Ken couldn't count on his team to save him. The mission, as it always did, would come first. It had to.

The nuns said, trust in God. He wondered if he ever had. Probably not. It was hard for an abandoned child to trust in anything they couldn't see.

Besides, Ken never had done well with fathers.

**only downward**

And yet Judas was just one man.

That's all it needs, Kase murmured, low and seductive as the serpent to Eve. An offer too good to refuse, and one man greedy or stupid or desperate enough to take it. Which are you? Money or fame or death, what the hell do _you_ have to lose? Things can hardly get worse. They're going to kill you anyway, and _they_ did this to you, they were the ones let you down… Deception's easy, and by the time it starts to matter you'll be dead. Who cares if they know it was you?

Ken cared. If there was to be a betrayal (and is there anything, the target said, that you would like to tell me?) he knew it would come from him, and it would be his team that he sold.

Even the thought left him horrified. The last thing Ken wanted was to betray them, but what he wanted was irrelevant. He stared fixedly into nothing at all, tears queuing up, breath catching in his throat and Christ knew what he'd done to his hands but it hurt, it hurt so bad he couldn't even form a fist without wanting to scream. There were splinters in his fingers, shards of wood trapped under his nails: something was bleeding. He was bleeding, he could smell it, could feel the blood, hot and heavy and ticklish, crawling over his hands.

He had never feared death before but Ken had always presumed it would come quickly. A single slip, a moment's pain, and then nothing but darkness: that kind of death would be easy. Why worry about that? He hadn't been counting on seeing it coming and knowing he could do nothing to save himself. He couldn't hold up to this, lying in darkness watching death circling about him, creeping ever closer.

The target would come to him and offer him an ending and, weeping and hating himself, Ken would sell his team for nothing but the promise of a quick, merciful end and he probably wouldn't even get that—

(Find me. Please, _please_, find me. Get me out of here, before I betray us all.)

"I'm a florist," Ken whispered, and even in his own head he sounded beaten-down and miserable. "We sell flowers."

**it leads to the city**

"The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me by still water, he restores my soul, he leads me in paths of righteousness…"

Ken knew he had no right to pray, and yet what else could he do? It hurt to clasp his hands, to lace his fingers together; tears sprang to his eyes as he pressed his palms together. His fingers weren't moving right. When they found him (but _when_?) they would shudder over the state of his hands. Here lies a stranger, a boy of nineteen left trapped in a waking nightmare with nothing to do but to wait—

He was alive, they would say, when they put him down here. They would say that whoever he was, whatever his sins, he didn't deserve what had been done to him. Nobody deserved to die like that. To die like this.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for…" Ken heard his voice, already shaking, break; he bit his lip in a vain attempt to choke back a sob, screwing his eyes shut against the darkness. Oh, Christ and Saint Joseph. Oh, Mary Mother of God. Please. _Please_. "I will fear no evil, for you are with me…"

Ken wept.

Wept, and barked his knuckles on the lid of the coffin as he raised his hand to wipe at his eyes, and talked through his tears, like a child. "Surely," he said, though he didn't believe it, could never have believed it again, "surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. Amen."

Amen. It was wrong, it was all wrong. He knew he'd forgotten.

Twenty-three was a jigsaw with half the pieces missing. It was a book, with a hank of pages torn roughly from the bindings and scattered God knew where. He'd chosen an easy one (_everyone_ knew twenty-three, God damn it! Didn't even have to _believe_ this shit to know this one—!) and it made no damned difference. He just couldn't remember, that was all. He couldn't, but maybe – and even the thought was a desperate one; it left him feeling frantic and guilty and only half-sane – maybe, Ken thought, if I can remember it all, maybe then I'll be saved.

**what it's like to be dead**

"You're dead," Ken said, when finally he found his voice.

Kase must have smiled. Smiling, he came to crouch at Ken's head: the very tips of his fingers, long and slender and spidery, grazed lightly against Ken's fringe as he gazed down into his face, like a guest at a wake.

"You so sure you're not? I did say we'd meet again."

And there was the smile, familiar and idiosyncratic and utterly lost: Ken's breath caught painfully in his throat, a soft, stifled sound escaping his lips and he wasn't sure if he was gasping or choking back a sob, or even why it should have mattered. Kase's smile was lopsided and no more than semi-sincere, and it carried with it the slightest hint of cruelty. Ken couldn't remember if that had always been there, or if it never had been. Maybe he was making it up, just like he was making up Kase…

He had to be making him up. Kase was _dead_. Ken had torn him open, watched him guttering and fading, bleeding his life out on an unremarkable stretch of paving before an unremarkable office tower.

"Not me," Ken said. Why should he have sounded so uncertain? "Death wouldn't be this boring."  
Kase just shrugged. "Hell's what you make it. Trust me."_  
Trust_ me? "We already played that," Ken said, and heard himself start to laugh.  
"You lost," Kase said comfortably.  
"No." Ken turned his head, so he wouldn't have to look in Kase's eyes any more. "_No_, Kase. We both lost."  
"You sentimental bastard, Hidaka. Tell me… can you think of anything _worse_ than this?"

No. Of course he couldn't, not any more. There was nothing worse than this – lying trapped in perfect darkness with his own voice too loud in his ears, cramped and chilled to the bone and desperately thirsty, and with nothing to do but wait for an ending, however it came. Pain was a nothing next to this. Betrayal was better, burning was. Ken had died once already and it had been easier than this.

If he wasn't dead he was dying, and if this didn't kill him…

(You're going to talk, said the target. Eventually.)

"Exactly. You totally sure this isn't Hell? It's not just burning for ever, you know. Hell is…" Kase hesitated. Smiled, just slightly. "It's more _personal_."  
"No. No, that's not it. There's a mission, they're coming back to me, there's something I have to tell them—"  
"You sure? Look at me, Ken." Kase's hands were on his face. All Ken could do was close his eyes and it didn't help. "No. _Look_ at me."

There was blood on Kase's hands, and the front of his too-white suit was scored with a series of five telltale tears. His breath smelled faintly sweetish, hung heavy with rot. He was a monster, tainted with the stench of the grave.

"You're _dead_, Kase. I saw you die. Fuck off."  
Kase laughed, soft as sighing. He had never laughed like that before, back when they were alive. It made Ken think of the wind in winter-naked trees, and dry bones. "Sorry, no. I'm not going anywhere. Don't you know what I am?" Though he knew full well there was nothing to hear but the wheeze of the pump and, louder, the sound of his own breathing, the triumph in Kase's voice still made Ken shudder. "I'm you, Ken. I'm you."

**a ghost story**

Of course Ken knew what Kase was. He knew this was an another attempt to escape. He had struggled, he had fought, _hello, can I help you?_ he had screamed until his voice gave out, he had clawed at the wood before him until his fingers were ripped and blood-slick, and pain and exhaustion made him stop. The trapped, stale air hung heavy with the coppery tang of his own blood.

_You tried to get away_, Kase said, _and you did a piss-poor job of it. Now your mind's trying the same trick._

Ken knew why Kase was there, but that didn't make him feel any less afraid.

**walled city**

No, it wasn't true. There was a mission, they were coming back for him, there was something he had to say that would make all this stop—God, how badly he wanted this to stop! There was the truth, Hidaka; hang onto that. He was alive, but he was trapped and terrified and he was alone, he was all alone. Kase was a nothing: he wasn't even a real ghost, just a phantom of the mind. Nobody spoke to him, he was talking to himself, to a voice that nobody else could have heard. The hands that touched Ken's face… There was nothing _there_.

Kase had betrayed him once already, but he was right. I'm you, Ken. I'm you…

(I couldn't leave even if I wanted to.)

Ken wasn't dead but he was dying by inches, of the thirst and of the cold – the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want; the pieces were missing, he'd lost the fucking _pieces_! – and Kase just waited. He had all the time in the world.

"What do you want?"  
"Me?" For a moment, Kase looked almost comically startled – he had never seen that expression on Kase's face before. It had no place there, it looked all wrong on him, left him looking like a blurred, bad photocopy of Youji play-acting at going undercover. Kase was fading, slipping from his fingers; he didn't remember him right any more. "I don't want anything. You're not getting rid of me that easily, Kenken."

Kase had never called him that, either.

The target stepped quietly from the shadows and drifted idle as smoke over to Kase, placing a heavy, paternal hand on his shoulder: a nothing of a gesture, and yet there was no mistaking the threat in it. He loomed. Ken wanted to tell him to get the Hell away from Kase, and he had nothing to offer him. Nothing at all – just an inadmissible truth that would damn them all.

"We sell flowers," Ken said.  
Kase laughed at him. His eyes were green. "You're losing it, Hidaka."  
"I'm a florist." You don't understand, Kase. Don't you _see_ him?  
"I always knew," said Kase, "that you were crazy."

And when had Kase started telling him the truth? He remembered a dull, rainy afternoon and nothing much to do but mark time (and why should that be so difficult, when it rained? He never had any problems finding things to do with the whole twelve year old world to do it in, but when it rained, when there was nothing to do but fold himself away in Kase's room and wait for the sun, time dragged its feet) and himself sprawled face-down upon Kase's bed watching his friend playing Sonic 2, and Kase throwing the controller aside and grabbing his collar and—he'd shoved him backward, said, _cut that out._ Had Kase thought him crazy even then?

But this wasn't Kase. It wasn't anyone. It was only Ken himself, lost in the shadows with nothing to do but die, arguing with a made-up man...

All right, so he was crazy. But what exactly – Ken placed his hands, palms flat, on the wood before him as if to anchor himself: _yes, here I am_ – what was so _sane_ about this? If sanity was a wooden box, darkness so thick he felt he could choke on it, and the air reeking of damp earth, why the Hell _not_ go mad?

"You'd better watch out, kid," Kase said, almost kindly, "or there won't be anything left of you to come back."

(You must be mad or you wouldn't have come here… the Cheshire Cat vanished slowly, from the tip of his tail, until only his smile remained. A soul could get lost in Wonderland.)

"I don't want to come back," Ken said, and he sounded petulant as a child. "Nobody's coming." What's to come back to, Kase? Answer me that.  
"Don't count on it," Kase said. And, "Bye bye, Kenken. I'll see you later."

It could have been a promise, or a threat.

**the tree stands in the center**

It started, as so many other stories had done before, with a woman.

Ken had thought she was a nurse at first. Hidaka-san, you have a visitor: her heels clicked against the linoleum as she strode through the door, her head up and her bearing erect as a soldier's. Temptation was a woman, a pretty, curvy redhead with soft curls and cold eyes, standing by his bedside with her arms folded beneath her breasts, gazing down at him like a scientist might gaze down the barrel of her microscope at an uninteresting specimen. _Have you ever heard of an organization called Kritiker_? She hadn't thought to tell him he was selling his soul.

But Eve could have fallen alone. The fault was his own, the burden of guilt his to shoulder: a sin however reluctantly perpetrated was a sin all the same. Oh, he could say, the woman gave me fruit and I did eat—he could say what he liked but God knew the truth, all the way back to Adam. All Erika had done was show him the way.

It's not the woman's fault if you take her hand, and fall with her.

The Lord is my shepherd—

**dust**

And some day, maybe, Omi would find his sign tucked away behind a row of planters in the stock cupboard, or hidden between the pages of an old order book, and wish that he was still around to yell at.

Ken knew it wasn't much of a sign. Just a roughly rectangular piece of cardboard stolen from the side of a delivery box with the words 'closed for lunch' printed on it in black marker, in his own handwriting. One slow, rainy, seventeen year old afternoon he, feeling penned in and frustrated and utterly sick of flower shops, had made the sign, printing the characters as neat and as careful as he could manage, and stuck it to the shop door; two years down the line it had become a habit. Youji didn't say anything: why would he when he appreciated the break just as much as Ken did? As for Aya, even he had to eat.

Four times he'd destroyed the sign to keep Omi from finding it. Twice, he'd simply lost track of it for a while. It didn't matter. It was an easy enough task to make a new one.

Really, he'd said, they expect us to sell flowers? Is this some kind of a joke?

The truly weird thing was he'd grown to rather enjoy it. Morning in the flower shop – if he closed his eyes he could see it so clearly it hurt. Mid-morning on a cloudy Tuesday with custom slowing to a standstill: sometimes, Ken would look up from the order he was fussing over and simply watch – watch, though there was nothing whatever to see. Just Aya scowling at nothing in particular, and a load of flowers, and languid Youji propping up the register with his chin resting on the heel of one slender hand… Omi didn't know how lucky he was to escape those dreary, dragging Tuesdays.

It could have been a fantasy, or a memory. There was the shop, gaudy with paintbox blooms, the air heavy with the scents of pollen and leaf mold and damp earth; there was Youji, eyelids drooping, constantly threatening to fall asleep in his seat but never quite getting there; there was Momoe's cat weaving about Ken's ankles, and dirt under his nails.

And fallen petals, blood on the floor. Rosettes of blood spattered across the tiles and tracked into the back rooms, smears of it across the white walls, and the shattered glass fronts of the display cabinets. Youji raised his head at the chime of the shop door, granting the young woman who stepped inside a charming smile, and somewhere just out of sight a man was screaming, and his voice was familiar. If Ken closed his eyes he could see them dying.

He was going to talk.

He was going to kill them.

And there was nothing, absolutely nothing that he could do.

**&amp; ashes**

"Oh God."

Ken's mouth was dry, his throat was hoarse and his voice sounded like a stranger's, but he kept talking. Jesus and Saint Jude help him, he kept talking.

When he fell silent, the noise was unbearable.

When he fell silent there was nothing. There was the silence, thick and oppressive, broken only by the sound of his own breathing; there was the darkness, heavy and total – and, caught somewhere on the edge of awareness, there was the soft, regular sighs of the air pump: a nothing of a sound, wallpaper for the ears. Rhythmic, persistent as the purr of a fan or waves breaking on a distant shore, or the grumble of traffic crawling through the clogged city streets, it hardly counted as noise at all. It was one of those sounds the brain tired of hearing and so shut itself off to.

Ken thought the noise would drive him mad. Should have stopped hearing it long ago, but he couldn't shut it off or pretend it meant nothing. There was nothing else to concentrate on that would have him forgetting to hear it: there was only his own voice to drown it out. When he was quiet, he feared the noise might deafen him. Shut up, Ken thought desperately, please, for Christ's sake, _shut up_!

And yet he didn't want that at all. All he could think of was what would happen if the noise stopped…

"Oh God," Ken said – it wasn't a prayer and it wasn't a plea. It wasn't anything. Just a single, cracked-record phrase, repeated and repeated until all sense was gone. "Oh God, oh God, oh God."

**alice**

Sometimes (not often, but often enough) he would think in _what ifs_.

Usually they were simple. The regrets any man in his situation might well have shared, guilt-born and couched in the terms _if only I hadn't_. If he still had his mother, or his father had bothered to try; if Kase had never betrayed him, or if they had never met at all; if he'd had enough talent to play well for fun, but never enough to be envied it; if he'd died when they'd said he did, what would have changed? If there'd never been a woman whose name wasn't Erika or an organization that called itself Kritiker, if he'd known temptation when he saw it. Never fell.

Weiss were just another regret. Another handful of sins mortal and sins venal, committed remorsefully but committed all the same. There was nothing about them to do over when they should never have been done at all… And yet, caught against a gray ground, he could see the slender, silhouetted figure of a woman – she was a girl really, barely any older than he was – bearing an infant in her arms.

Slender and beautiful and… and _familiar_, somehow. At first he thought she must have been his mother, but where his mother had been short and plump and bosomy this girl was taller, long-haired and loose-limbed; she held the child as if it were somehow accidental, as if someone had handed it to her bare minutes before and she didn't quite know what to do with it. She was a gawky, charming mess of a girl and Ken had loved her so much it left him breathless – so much he'd had no choice but to let her go.

Sometimes (not often enough, because to think of her at all left him dazed and aching and strangely resentful – and what else could he ever have done?) Ken would think of her.

He wanted to call out to her, but he couldn't find the words.

(I miss you, he wanted to say. And, I'm sorry.)

There was no child, of course. Just the pale little ghost of something that could have been, if it hadn't been snuffed out before it had really begun: she was ghostlike too, wan and insubstantial as smoke and yet, the baby cradled awkwardly in her arms, there she was. Distant, too distant to touch, she had been watching him all along, silent and grave-eyed, as if she were waiting for something – and what was there that he could give to her now?

"Yuriko," Ken said.

She started at the sound of her name, gave him a vague smile – she didn't recognize him at all except as a face from some half-forgotten daydream – and then, lifting the baby to rest against her shoulder, she turned her back to him. Erasing him with the turn of her head, she padded away, losing herself in the light. That was all his fault too.

**three of five**

Yet sometimes they would bargain. Sometimes, still and silent and quite unsmiling, he would watch them cower and _what do you want_, they would ask. They would say, _I have money_. They would say, _do you want my car?_ Hands shaking, they would hold the keys out to him. They held them at arm's length, between finger and thumb or cradled in a sweat-damp palm. You can have my car, you can take my money. Name your price: name anything you want, and it's yours. I'll make sure of it, I promise – just don't kill me. Please, I'm begging you, _please_ don't kill me!

They had nothing they could offer him but still they would bargain. Take my money, take everything I own, just leave me my life… now Ken tried the same thing, pleading not with the target but with the silent and indifferent saints. Saint Joseph, Saint Jude, I lay it all before you. Anything you like is yours, if you'll but let me live.

I'll do anything, he thought, frantic as a deathbed prayer. Anything at all. I'll be better, I'll judge not, I promise I can change. I'll leave Weiss, I'll never kill again – I never wanted to, Lord, but a sin's still a sin. I never should have done it. Death pays all debts but it's Yours to avenge: it was always Yours. I'm a sinner. I'm weak. I'm wrong and I'm sorry. I sold my soul for a handful of silver, and now I'll buy the potter's field, for the priests to bury strangers in. Just one more chance, Mother Mary. Please, I'm begging you, _please_ let me live…

Yet why should God extend His grace to a murderer?

Ken had nothing he could offer either.

**the lake is frozen**

That wasn't it either. There was still twenty-three; salvation would come through memory. Ken believed in that now. It was crazy, it was senseless, but it was a comfort. Far easier for him to believe that than to realize that there was truly nothing he could do. As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff – he smiled, eyes wide; he could do this, he could save himself, now _please_ – they comfort me.

I'll keep my side of the deal. Just save me. Mary mother of God, save me.

Ken thought he must have been screaming. He couldn't tell for sure. He couldn't remember giving into his own terror again, losing himself in it, but he must have done. Certainly his throat felt dry and abraded but what else was new? He didn't know. He didn't even know if his eyes were open or closed: he thought they must have been open, and _just like that _Omi was there. He didn't come like Kase had: Omi came vague as a ghost, a no more than half-seen figure caught on the edge of sight. When Ken tried to turn his head the boy slipped from view as if, like a ghost, he could never be faced head-on.

"You're not real," Ken said: like a prayer, a prayer of exorcism. His voice shook. "You're not really _here_."  
"No," Omi said. "Of course I'm not."

He smiled and his smile was calm, compassionate and utterly unremarkable; it was a benevolent lie. It was the kind of smile the boy would offer, with a flower, to a pretty girl caught moping by the display cases. He looked so normal, did Omi. He always looked so normal, so utterly benign, every inch of him some young girl's favorite Saturday-afternoon shop-boy. Dressed all in white, a slight breeze tugging at the hanging ends of his tee-shirt and tenderly tousling his fair hair like the fingers of a fond uncle, even here there was sunlight on his face. Girls looked at him and saw nothing but warmth and guilelessness, ice cream melting down the knuckles and sunlight on daisies. Safety.

Ken believed in Omi and Omi was a liar.

"Nothing you can see exists." Omi crouched to look at him, knees drawn up to his chest and fingers laced before him, as if Ken were some kind of curiosity. "Kase was quite correct, you know. I'm you. We're all _you_."  
"Am I going crazy?"  
"Probably. It's the sanest response."

All Omi made it sound was logical. From him it even seemed sensible, just the next step. (But the path led downward, only down.) Ken lay in darkness and talked to himself – and whyever not? What else would he have to anchor him, if it weren't for the voices in his head?

Ken swallowed. "I'm going to talk," he said, and it was simply a statement.  
Omi nodded briskly, as if he had never expected anything else. He didn't even look surprised. "You're not that good, Ken-kun," he said as if by way of an explanation. "None of us are that good."

The boy spoke as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. To him it probably was – but he wasn't real, Ken reminded himself. This wasn't Omi. This wasn't anybody at all: it was only another part of himself. It was his mind out there, struggling (like a pinned-down bug, something small and delicate with gauzy wings, something easily crushed) to keep itself together. Christ, it was pathetic to think he'd broken so easy.

"Not really," Omi said simply. "Everything can be broken if you know where to push."  
Ken said, "I'm sorry."  
"I'm sorry too, Ken-kun." The worst thing about it was Omi genuinely sounded it. "I'm sorry."

Which meant he was dead regardless.

(Would the real Omi have said something like that? Would he have sounded sorry? Ken didn't know any more, he hardly knew if he ever had done. What, when it came down to it, the Hell _did _he know about Omi? He once thought he knew Kase too, and look how well that had ended up!)

It was almost a relief. Once he'd prayed for escape but now Ken merely prayed for an ending, however it came. There was, after all, more than one route to salvation. "You're going to kill me."  
"Probably," Omi said again, just that, and it was all wrong. The real Omi would never have been that straightforward. It was him out there, blunt and hostile and awkward, and he didn't know how else to be. "I'm sorry. We'll probably have to. We're all dead otherwise."  
Ken swallowed. "Then kill me," he said hopelessly. "Please, Omi."  
The boy just smiled sadly. "But I'm not real, Ken-kun. Nothing here is real."

(Yet Ken fancied he could feel one of the boy's hands, his skin marble-cool and his touch gentle, resting lightly against his bare shoulder, and he shivered because he knew that what Omi was saying was true. Nothing here was real – so what the Hell was that? What did he just feel touch him if there was nothing there to feel?)

"Remember that, Ken-kun."

And he was gone, melting back into the shadows as suddenly as he had appeared, leaving Ken alone.

**we all fall down**

When he fell silent, the noise was unbearable.

When Ken fell silent there was nothing. There was only the sound of the pump, sighing gently to itself as if in sorrow, unable to believe that he should have been brought so low. It sounded (how strange!) it sounded like something from a hospital. Like a ventilator, or some other benevolently malicious device created to sustain life, which all too often merely condemned the man who relied on it to a lingering, degrading death. How, Ken wondered, could you claim to be alive when you couldn't even breathe for yourself?

When the pump began to fail, when whatever it was that powered it gave out, he would suffocate. God, how he would have welcomed it! Please, _please_, Saint Joseph and Saint Jude, get me out of here. I don't care how, just get me out of here before I betray us all.

And it hurt, it hurt to talk. His mouth was dry, and tasted bitter. His voice rasped in his throat like a file pressed to a bar. Even the trapped, thrice-used air seemed stale.

_Hail Mary full of grace—_

**exile**

"We sell flowers," Ken whispered.

His eyes, though there was nothing whatever to see, were open wide; he could feel a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Smiling, he ran his hands against the lid of his coffin, the roof of his prison, tracing a pattern that only he could see. The wood, scarred with the marks his nails, now bruised and split to the quick, had left behind, felt rough beneath his palms. Three days they'd buried Christ. How could He have borne it?

His fingers hurt. He thought they must have been bleeding again.

The wood bore scratches; they would know that he had lived once, and that he had fought for it. He had failed, he had known he would fail, but still he had fought. It wasn't enough, but it was something.

Now, over those scratches, Ken wrote his name so that when they found his body they would know who he was.

"We sell flowers. I'll show you."

**honor thy father**

He was buried with his mother.

Ken never had done well with fathers. Sometimes, his head bowed low over a wreath or a garland, Ken would wonder if his father had come to his funeral, or ever visited his grave. Sometimes, he would wonder how his father had felt on hearing about his death…

First Kase had come, smirking and smelling of rot and gazing at him with Youji's eyes; then there had been Omi and even here he had been comforting. Now, looking uncomfortable and out of place and totally insignificant – bastard, Ken thought furiously, you _bastard_, how _dare_ you come here now! – there was his father. A wan, rumpled-looking little man, faded as a figure in a forgotten photograph and fraying slightly at the edges. His hair was tousled and needed cutting. His suit was old and ill-fitting, a cheap department-store knockoff that would have looked no better when new.

He had done nothing and been nowhere. He might as well have never left.

"You never cared," Ken heard himself say.  
"Never's a big word," his father said, soft as a sigh: oh Jesus, Ken thought, _spare_ me the parable! "I couldn't stay."  
Another denial; Ken half-expected to hear a cock crowing, yet he would be the one left to mourn – and what the Hell had he expected from this man? "Damn it! _Why_ couldn't you?" Look what you did to me! "_Why_?"

There was no answer. Certainly Ken had none; his father's ghost knew no more.

(Even in his own head, he couldn't make his father feel sorry.)

Sometimes Ken wondered what it was his father had been feeling the day he left his life behind. If the man had felt even remotely guilty about what he had gone on to do to his family, his own _children_, how the Hell could he have gone through with it? Ken could never have done it, he didn't know how anyone could. Had the bastard even felt _bad_?

Ken's mother had no choice but to let him go: his father simply left, abandoning his little family as he had abandoned the rest of his dead wife's effects – her shoes and her dresses, sad and chaste and ample; the wedding dress she had kept wrapped in paper in a bottom drawer, the cheap little ornaments she had so carefully hoarded and carefully kept clean until she grew too ill to dust – on the church doorstep and walking away, hands in his pockets, without so much as glancing back. Just junk, just so much junk to be cleared out without a second thought.

Her children were only another reminder.

"Even if I told you," his father was saying, "what would it change?"

He had no answer. What possible difference could _why_ make when actions spoke so plain? His father's excuses would be just another pathetic, self-glorifying justification, just another poor-little-me whine. It wasn't me, it wasn't my idea—he'd heard it all too many times before, heard it from men cornered like rats, throwing the blame onto everyone and everything else they could think of but never onto themselves. It was all bullshit anyway; your sins were your own. If a man owned nothing else in this world, at least he would own his sin.

Ken turned his head, gazed into nothing at all. "What the fuck would you know about it? You're me, you bastard! You're not even real!"  
"I'm afraid so," said his father and, smiling, shook his head. "I'm not real. None of this is. Look after yourself, Ken."

The man smiled at him, placing a heavy, proprietorial hand on his head – a second of contact, maybe two, then it was over and he was gone: nobody's father again. Ken covered his face with his wounded hands, and he wept. What hurt the most was that he had expected nothing else. An abandoned child learned early that they could rely on nobody.

The nuns told him to make himself agreeable; he could still find new parents. Ken, shy and angry and resentful, and still in shock, wasn't surprised not to. His own father hadn't wanted him – why in the world would anyone else?

When he was young Ken had wished his father dead. Now he just hoped his father thought of him sometimes, and he hoped that the thought hurt.

**fait accompli**

_You're going to talk_, the target said.  
Ken said, _I know_.

**decades**

_O my Jesus  
forgive us our sins._

He counted fifty. He had no beads so he counted in his head, scratching one nail against the lid of the coffin, hoping against hope he would keep count and maybe, if he got it right, then God would look kindly upon him and he might still be saved. He stood, head bowed, before the judge, and said his prayers, and a single slip would be all it took to damn him. Hail Mary, hail Mary, hail Mary full of grace; one step nearer to the fold. His lips, dry and bitten bloody, moved without sound.

Lamb of God, have mercy upon us.

_Save us from the fires of hell  
lead all souls to Heaven._

He counted fifty – but, like twenty-three, the prayers slipped through his fingers swift and sure as warm sand through the fingers of a boy on a long-forgotten childhood beach. Evening in the kitchen and stock bubbling on the stove, dust motes dancing in the sunlight as it slanted through the blinds, and Romantic Mode singing _Love Is The Destiny _as he washed and cut scallions for the dinner nobody else would have noticed missing, if he hadn't been there to shove it in front of them… The prayers had been lost, drowned in a sea of junk music and lines from bad movies he'd watched only out of boredom; now he hunted for the words frantic as a woman searching for her scattered beads, hoping against hope that somehow he could string the prayers back together.

Lamb of God, have mercy upon us.

_Especially those in most need of Thy mercy_.

He counted fifty (hail holy Queen, Mother of mercy) stumbling over verses he had half-forgotten, prayers he barely recalled saying at all, never mind saying and meaning. Counted fifty, and counted again (Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) he believed just enough to believe he was damned. He had no right to pray, but he didn't know what else to do. God had let him fall long ago, but what did he have to cling to if he didn't have faith? Lead us home, mother Mary. Our father who art in heaven, _we sell flowers_—

Lamb of God, bring us peace.

_Amen._

**five of five**

Yet sometimes – rarely: in three years murdering for money it had happened, he was sure, no more than twice – they would smile at him and step forward, and they would say, _I'm ready_. They were evil to the very marrow yet they knew the secret: everybody who lived would die, sooner or later, of something. Why fight when your own turn came?

There was (or so Ken had thought, though he had never tried to explain it to the others) something almost admirable in that. A target who embraced his death had at least possessed the courage not to compound his sins with hypocrisy. In life he had shown no mercy to his victims; now, facing his own end at the hands of a man not all that different from himself, he expected nothing more. He had known the game was over, and that at the last he had lost everything. There was nothing more he could do…

Ken had been afraid the first time he'd faced a target who saw no fear in death. Now, far beyond fear himself, he finally understood. God didn't grant second chances.

To die would be only a relief.

The nun had smiled and sung for him as she bled her life out in his arms. Back then Ken had wept, but now his eyes were dry. Now, thinking of her, he merely smiled, his gaze distant as morning stars. She hadn't meant to, but in death she had told him the truth: life was sin, but to die would be to put an end to sinning. Sometimes, death could be a beautiful thing. It could be all a soul could ever have wanted.

Soon the target would come for him and ask again if he had anything to tell him, and offer him an ending. Ken would weep, he would hate himself, but he would take it…

So he would pray the pump failed first. He would pray that thirst took him, or madness. He would pray for death to come quickly, and for forgiveness. Ken would die smiling, and through his death he would save them all. I'm ready, Saint Joseph. Show me the way.

Death would be freedom.

**the way to the plains**

_Oh death, where is thy victory_ – the phrase had got stuck. It had snared on something in his mind, and become trapped there. Two sentences, two questions caught in his head and they weren't even Ken's was a line from a hymn, he thought, or a prayer, or maybe from a sermon: he'd heard it before, too many times to count. He had never understood it back when he was alive, but now he saw clearly. _Oh death, where is thy sting?_

He might have been trying to talk. Another broken-record phrase, repeated over and over. Soon the pump would fail, and all sound would cease.

All sound: he was hearing things again.

Nobody was there. Kase was gone; Omi too, and the target. Ken was alone, with nothing but the darkness behind his eyes and the laboring pump and the sound of his own heartbeat too loud in his ears, and he was pretending that, far above him, he could hear voices. Perhaps the voices were in his own head, perhaps they were the voices of angels, or a wandering poet and his guide – who knew? It was just sound and it wasn't real. None of this was real, only the darkness and the cold, and the simple fact of his own death. That much he could count on.

Not the voices – someone far above him was calling out, over and over again, calling something that might have been his name as if anybody should remember that. As if calling to the dead would help! It didn't mean anything at all, it was simply a thin thread of sound.

"We sell flowers," Ken whispered.

It was his _name_.

(It really should have meant more.)

The cries came louder now. Louder and, with them, the sound of movement and surely, he thought, goodness and mercy shall follow me all of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever but he couldn't remember: the beads had been scattered long ago, scattered and been lost. He was dying, that or dead, and it was only a relief…

Yet that wasn't it at all. There was something different in the quality of the air, some lessening of the weight of the earth bearing down upon him and _this is real_, something in him murmured, and what did that mean? The dead would rise bodily on Judgment Day. The saints would come, and the angels; they, the dead, would be pulled from the ground and led to await their verdicts… what would that be if not _real_?

Ken wondered what it was that had killed him in the end and listened to the voices, all strangely familiar, almost even comforting, without really hearing a word – they called to him and to each other but he could hardly tell the difference, hardly imagine why it mattered. It was just noise, noise and the sensation of _weight_, not of soil, but of someone gently lowering themselves onto the top of the coffin, hands slipping across the lid, brushing off the mud and searching for something: searching, then finding. It meant nothing, and yet it was all real.

Somehow it seemed crazier than the visions. There was someone up there after all, yet Ken felt nothing. Not relief, not a sudden rush of fear: he had been trapped somewhere far beyond terror, beyond perhaps everything. All he thought was _here we go again—_he felt nothing, but he didn't know if he could bear it.

He closed his eyes and, heedless of the pain, clasped his hands together. The skin of his chest, clammy and cold, felt like the flesh of a man newly killed.

(_Ken_, somebody was saying, over and over: it hardly sounded like a name at all. _Ken_—for of course they would know his name.)

Then light, as if it really was that simple. As though all the Lord had to do was wish it: wood scraped against wood and somewhere a million miles distant, someone cursed. He felt sure he should have recognized that voice. He should have known it anywhere and yet all it was to him was eerily and unaccountably familiar, like the figure of a slender girl with nothing in her arms but a potentiality. Ken almost laughed. Only you, Hidaka, _only you_ could fuck up resurrection. He'd always thought it would be easier than this for the angels…

He said, "Hail Mary," and the words came soft as a sigh, caught and carried almost accidentally on his breath.

The chill of the air, when it hit his lungs, made him gasp. The air smelled fresh, cool and crisp and forest-sweet, and when he opened his eyes he opened them on the heavens.

And he did not want, and he feared no evil.

There were figures with familiar faces gazing down at him, their clothes spattered with mud as if they had climbed only recently from their own graves: their faces were pale and there was terror trapped in their eyes. Why are you _frightened_, Ken wanted to ask. What on earth is there to be afraid of? He wondered, for a moment, if he was dreaming again. He wondered if they would all be judged together, and punished likewise.

It hurt to know they had died so young, so soon after he had. Perhaps that had been his fault too. Perhaps, after all, the target had found them—but everything that lived had to die, sooner or later, of something. It was too late to confess, but God had always known the truth. Why compound his sins with falsehood?

So Ken said, "We sell flowers," and his voice was hushed and fervent as the voice of a child at prayer.

"We sell flowers. I'll show you."

_\- continue -_


	2. Chapter 2

**&amp; rebehold the stars**

And the world flooded back, and it damn near drowned him.

For a single horrible moment there was chaos. Chaos and, with it, his own terrible confusion and maybe, just maybe this was what it was to go insane. For a time he never counted Ken had lain in darkness, with nothing more to anchor him than the sound of an air pump and the voices in his head: one moment there was nothing at all, the next he was caught in the epicenter of an explosion of color and noise and sensation, and scalding brightness. There were voices and they said his name. There was light, and Ken knew the light was real because the light hurt his eyes: his eyes could gain no purchase on it, and he recoiled. He might have screamed, if only he had possessed the strength to.

He stared into light overwhelming and unbroken as the darkness before it, but there were patterns in the light: planes, lines, shapes. There were forms and they were the forms of angels, but they had the faces of his friends. Maybe that was what they did when they came to you. Maybe they pulled a figure from your mind, and worked from there…

And then there was just the moon, wound about in skeins of cloud and imprisoned behind the bare boughs of autumn-naked trees, and the wind ghosting against his bare skin, raising goose-pimples on his arms and making him shiver, and, sudden and startling as a stolen kiss, there was rain on his cheeks. He was cold, and it felt good.

Ken had died; now he had been reborn. Reborn to what?

He struggled to sit and found he could barely move; he fought to talk, and could barely even whisper. When God had come up with the idea of bodily resurrection, clearly He hadn't thought through exactly what that would involve. Maybe the downsides just hadn't occurred to Him. Perhaps it was different when your body was perfect and ineffable, not some sluggish lump of dust and clay, when you didn't have to deal with limbs that seized up through nothing but inaction, and dizziness and nausea and thirst. There were bony little fingers clawing at his legs, heavy hands clasping his shoulders tight enough to bruise as they struggled to lift, and they hurt; it was all he could do not to shy away, try to struggle free. Surely this wasn't how it was meant to work?

Angels shouldn't have needed to do all this.

The strangest part of all was that when they spoke to one another, they used the names of his friends.

No, it wasn't meant to be like this. The nuns had told him about Judgment Day, but they'd never had been good with details: they'd never told Ken he'd spend it shivering and wanting to puke, if only he'd had anything to throw up on…

There were arms about him, warm and strong, tightening about his body as an unseen figure pulled him up and out of the hole. There was – did everyone get this? – there was a wood, skeletal trees with branches like the bars crowding about them, and light so bright it burned streaming out from between them, seemingly from nowhere at all. There was the heavy, cloying reek of turned earth and a tapestry of green and brown scents from the forest, and rain on his skin.

There was a smear of mud up the length of one of his numb lower legs, showing obscenely dark against cold, pallid flesh. Ken shivered and closed his eyes and pretended he was alone.

"Azrael," he whispered to the creature that held him. As good a name as any for his personal angel of death.

He wished he knew what had happened to the others.

**absent friends**

It wanted to be called Youji.

Certainly it looked like Youji, for all that was the easy part. Though, with the light blazing agonizingly from behind it like that, Ken couldn't really see the figure's face, it was the right size and shape, and its long damp hair hung heavy about its face like Youji's did after a shower. It even smelled faintly of cigarettes like Youji did, though otherwise its scent was altogether wrong. It was, at least, a good enough attempt. Good enough that when the creature said, _it's me_, Ken struggled to force a smile to his own lips and pretended he believed it. It looked like Youji, and its hands were warm and it tried to touch him gently. What more could he have hoped for?

"It's me, Ken," the creature said; it placed him down on the ground, and even that it tried to do gently. It was a good liar, as good as Youji had been. "It's Youji. It's okay, Ken. It's over…"

Its words were as meaningless as the drumming of the rain, but Ken spoke to it anyway. Maybe he was tired of being alone, with nothing to see but the darkness and nothing to speak to save the voices in his own head. This wasn't Youji, but it wasn't his mind either. He remembered Youji far better than this.

So he called it by it's name, or the name it had chosen. He said, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…"

It was, he supposed, as close as he would get to apologizing to Youji.

For a moment he fancied the Youji-thing looked almost pained. Then it turned, straightening, gazing up at something, or someone, caught just out of Ken's line of sight. He could see the creature's face now; the light, as it turned from him, fell across its cheeks, and the figure squinted into it. Their face was Youji's, too, though the eyes were hard and cold and narrowed with anger. Ken couldn't remember the last time he'd seen that look on Youji's face – it would have been long ago, he was sure. Long ago, and something to do with a girl…

It said something that Ken didn't catch and a voice he didn't recognize, though he recognized its panic well enough, answered: it raised one hand, to gesture to whatever luckless soul stood behind it, and when it spoke it spoke with the voice of a judge pronouncing sentence. Azrael, Ken thought again. Azrael called Youji… When next it bent to him, its hands were full of dark, damp cloth. A shroud?

_We sell flowers_, Ken told it. _I'm a florist—_

The Youji-shaped thing didn't seem to care. It simply smiled at him – the smile, that was something else they couldn't get right: this was a mere upward quirk of the lips that had nothing to do with anything that was going on behind the creature's eyes – and, gentle as a father trying to help his sleeping child into their nightwear, carefully helped him to dress. Though he was chilled to the bone, though he was wracked with uncontrollable shivering, it hadn't occurred to Ken to worry about that before. Wasn't that how things were supposed to happen?

This wasn't something the angels did: not before the judgment, anyway, and Ken was certain he couldn't have been judged yet, because he hadn't been condemned. You'd remember something like that, he was sure – unless it had already happened, and so quietly he had barely been aware of it.

It could have been that, of course. Maybe the part with the coffin and the screaming and the voices in his mind had been how they did it in Purgatory for a man who had sent so many others to premature graves of their own. There was, after all, a twisted and terrible kind of poetry to it, just as there was to all divine justice. It was the kind of punishment a just God might choose to mete out to a man who had murdered simply because he had been told to; a merciful God, perhaps, would show His mercy at the last simply by allowing the punishment to come to an end. It could always have been that.

I don't know anything any more, Ken realized. I don't even remember how I died…

How strange that only now he was mostly clothed did it occur to Ken that he really should have been embarrassed by being found naked.

**lethe**

This was what salvation looked like, for clearly Ken had been saved. These creatures who looked like his friends had found him and clothed him, they had draped a damp and heavy coat about his shoulders like a blanket, and now the one that looked like Youji, one arm braced about his shoulders to help him sit, offered Ken water. The thing that wasn't quite his friend held a bottle to his dry, bitten lips; a trickle of water, cool and sweet, flowed into his mouth and down his dry, abraded throat. It wasn't enough. Ken snatched for the bottle and gulped greedily at the water until the bottle was drained nearly dry, and he felt quite sick with it.

His captors, the target and his dreamy, twisted protégé, had offered him blankets and water too, before they murdered him. He hadn't been grateful then.

Maybe he still shouldn't have been. Ken wondered if the angels shaped like his friends were going to kill him as well…

But for now he had been saved, and it was enough. Context was all

His stomach rebelled and he vomited: the nuns hadn't thought to mention _that_ bit, either. When Ken raised his head to look at the angel with Youji's face, he was smiling, or at least his chapped lips had twisted upward. He was gasping, shaking so badly he could barely manage to raise one bloodied and aching hand to wipe at his lips: he very nearly asked if he could have another drink.

_Gently_, the thing that might have been Youji whispered, his voice as soft as the wind sighing through the trees. _Gently._

**shadow that comes in sight**

And, sudden and unexpected as a slap to the cheek, Kase was leaning casually against the jutting branch of a tree.

Ken blinked at him, and Kase raised one hand as if in salute. His brow was resting lightly against his folded forearms, a warm, genuine smile tugged at the corners of his lips. There was blood on his torn suit, showing almost black in the half-light, seeping slowly into the pale fabric and dripping slowly down to pool about his feet.

"Well, I said I'd be back."  
"Where've you _been_, you bastard?" Ken demanded. "I missed you!"  
Kase laughed, briefly and without humor. "Knew you couldn't live without me. Couldn't die without me either, huh? You always were the needy one, Ken."  
"Everyone leaves," Ken whispered. He shivered, pulling the damp, oversized coat Youji had draped over his shoulders more tightly about himself. "Even you left me. Don't you get it? I'm tired of being alone."

Kase smiled; blood wept from his wound; his wind-tousled hair was tugged as if by invisible fingers and, as his friend shifted his weight, Ken saw not firm young skin or Kase's shining eyes and smiling lips but, behind them, delicate phalanges and the smooth curve of the ribs, a single sunken, empty eye socket, the skull's fixed grin. Kase flickered before him like old and overexposed film stock, skin and bone layered one on the other as in a demented slide show.

"Not my business," Kase said with a shrug. "You're the denominator, Ken. It's _you_. Doesn't that tell you something?"  
"Tell me something?"  
"Quit playing dumb, Ken. You play dumb far too often. Can't you see the pattern? For God's sake," Kase said, and he sounded frustrated as he had explaining, as Ken fretted and scowled over a science textbook, the intricacies of the carbon cycle, "_you're_ the one everyone ditches. Stop bitching about how miserable you are and try to work out why we all get so sick of you and your fucked-up, needy shit, okay? "  
Ken laughed at him. "Oh fuck off, Kase! You don't think that. _I_ do. You're me, you asshole. _You're me._"

There was a small rock lying on the pathway he sat on, and Ken snatched it up. For a second, maybe two, he tested the weight of it as it rested in his palm – then, a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in his throat, he flung it at the bleeding specter that had been his oldest friend. It hurt to close his hand about it, his aim was wild, but it made him feel better.

Ken grinned, and his grin was wild and raw. Kase simply spared him an offended glance and vanished, slowly melting back into the shadows as if he had never been there at all.

Don't think this is over, Kase told him.

Ken just smiled. He said, "I never did."

**in the wood of the suicides**

Someone was screaming, and it wasn't him.

The voice was a man's – Ken could tell it was a man, for all his screams were high and thin and agonized, and barely human at all. He'd heard too many men scream like that to believe otherwise.

It could have been worse, he supposed. At least the voice wasn't a woman's or, worse, a child's and hadn't there been something about kids? Dead boys, that was what this had been about – that was why he was here, and what he had died for. There'd been children dying like art, buried alone where nobody would ever find them, or even think to look. Even now Ken couldn't believe that he could have suffered more than they had, not when they had so much more to live for and he had gone into this eyes open. Shivering, Ken drew his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms about them and even that sent bolts of pain up his aching limbs, left him biting back a cry.

Someone was screaming, and his screams were terrible. Terrible as the cries of a man trapped alone in the darkness and waiting only to die, calling out to anyone at all to find him, save him, _please_. More than anything Ken wanted to get up and go after him and make whoever was hurting him stop, but his limbs ached and his hands and feet were torn and bleeding and he couldn't move, dammit! He just _couldn't move_…

Stop it, he thought: it felt like a prayer, every bit as desperate and frantic as twenty-three had done. Stop hurting him. If this man has to be killed, kill him quickly. Just stop hurting him.

Please stop.

**clarity**

"Verse five," Ken said: he couldn't stay silent for fear of the noise, he spoke only to himself. He flinched slightly when he heard the words echoed in a voice that was only painfully familiar – he hadn't expected to even be overheard, still less to be replied to.  
Youji asked, "Verse five?"  
Of course. Youji was here now, wasn't he? Or at least something that looked very like him was, something enough like his friend to be a comfort to him, whatever happened next. Looking up at the Youji-shaped creature by his side, Ken nodded, grave as a child. "I remember now."

(_The Lord is my shepherd_. Maybe now he would be saved, maybe they would all be, if only it wasn't too late—)

Yes. Yes, I _remember_. Ken swallowed. He recited, his voice hoarse, stumbling slightly over the words, "You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil... My cup overflows." He hardly knew what he expected Youji to say to that and yet Ken was gazing up at him, eyes expectant, as if he were waiting for his friend's reaction.  
"That's … great, Ken," Youji said.

And Ken knew he would never have imagined that look of bewilderment, or the confusion in his friend's voice – not on Youji. He never would have dreamed of languid, elegant Youji like this: nobody would have brought Youji's face and voice here only to have him bone-weary and slumped in the driver's side of Aya's car, his suit and shoes and even his too pallid skin spattered with mud, curls hanging limp and heavy with rainwater and the dark smudges of exhaustion showing plain beneath tired green eyes. This Youji smelled of earth and sweat and stale fear, he smelled like a man Ken had never met.

No, he could never have dreamed this. Azrael could have done better than Aya's stupid _Porsche_.

He realized for the first time that just maybe this Youji was real: not an angel with the face of a friend, or a restless wraith or a half-remembered phantom of the mind, but truly alive. Youji's hand, resting on his shoulder, felt warm and heavy and reassuringly solid: I'm here, Kenken. It's okay. I'm here…

Ken's hands were bandaged with his friends' discarded neckties, the clothes he wore were slightly too large and still smelled of alcohol and tobacco smoke, and of a stranger's expensive cologne, and Youji sat in the driver's seat of Aya's car listening to the jazz station, a bottle of French mineral water with a blood-smeared label held loosely in one hand. Just details, but details he would never have thought to dream.

This was real. Oh, God, this was _real_… If he thought about it too hard, he thought he might start to weep. And so Ken gave his friend a wan, clumsy, painfully genuine smile, because he didn't know what else he should do.

"You don't have a clue what I'm talking about," he said, "do you?"

**sv x hr = co**

On his knees, in the mud, Ken vomited: there was dirt beneath his aching palms, dirt and drifts of fallen leaves, damp and smeared with grime but still gaudy and strangely beautiful.

The screaming had stopped. Omi had come back, and smiled at him so kindly and gently Ken knew he had to look like crap. The kid had said, shall we go? and Ken had given him a weak grin of his own in return, and tried to stand. Bad idea. The worst. Pain had left him dazed, dizziness and nausea caught him by the throat and shook him, and let him drop; crying out more in surprise than in agony or in fear, he had stumbled and fallen, and when Omi crouched by his side Ken had waved the teenager away, and been suddenly and violently sick.

Afterwards – head bowed, shoulders shaking as he fought to catch his breath – he simply sat and waited for the pain in his feet to subside and his vision to clear. Omi's slim, clever fingers groped insinuatingly beneath his chin as the teenager searched for his pulse; from the hard, insistent pressure of the boy's fingers against the flesh of his throat and the sound of Omi's indrawn breath, Ken could tell whatever it was that his friend had felt there it was all wrong.

"What happened?" Youji said from somewhere above his head. "Ken, are you all… is he okay?"  
"He fell," Aya said, as if it were obvious.  
"Fell?" Youji echoed. "What the Hell was he doing trying to stand by himself?"  
Omi raised his head, clearing his throat slightly. "Youji-kun, Aya-kun, can you be quiet for a second? I've got to—"

It wasn't a surprise to Ken that his teammates talked over his head, as they might have done for an ill and frightened child. They discussed him as if he wasn't there at all, or couldn't understand them: it hardly seemed to matter very much. Sitting back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of the coat they had dressed him in, he gazed at an unremarkable spot between the boughs of the trees and waited, like a child, for them to finish talking and decide what to do. For whatever happened next to happen…

What were a few minutes more when he'd waited so long already? When it was quite enough for Ken that they had come back for him at all?

"He's in shock," Omi said.  
He heard Youji laugh, brief and bitter. "Of course he is."  
"No, Youji-kun. I mean…"

Omi meant _medically_. He meant the kind that killed.

You're not dead, Ken. You're only dying.

No wonder he felt like shit. The strangest thing was that Ken wasn't frightened – not at all. Maybe he'd simply forgotten how to be. Why worry about the fate of a dead man? (But this was real. Remember that.) Omi's words didn't move him; the tension that crept into the teenager's voice and the naked panic he thought he could see in Youji's weary green eyes didn't seem to have anything very much to do with him.

There was a blanket, thick and heavy, draped about Ken's shoulders; there was a hand on his brow, gently brushing his damp, tangled bangs out of his eyes. There were hands on his arms, helping him to find his feet, and he wished that his friends wouldn't make such a fuss over him.

"I'm all right," Ken murmured. "I'm fine…"  
"Christ, Kenken," Youji said gently, "and you call me a bullshitter."

**four quarters**

From the inside of Aya's Porsche, the world didn't look that different from how it did at the end of any other mission with a fucked-up 'A' plan. Yeah, things were a mess: yeah, we're still breathing. That was what mattered, right? Game cleared, roll the credits. It was time to go home.

They'd sat Ken in Youji's seat in the front of the car though, and he wasn't sure if this annoyed him or not. God knew he didn't like knowing his team were making an exception for him because they thought he wouldn't be able to handle the darker, closer confines of the back seat; God knew he was grateful they hadn't left him to plead with them not to be made to sit there. When he fumbled for the safety belt Omi had helped him and, as Omi draped a dry blanket he had clearly taken from someone's bed about him, he told him to sit tight. We'll have you out of here soon, Ken-kun.

I know, Ken had told him. And, thank you.

"I'll drive," Youji said.

Youji had unfolded himself gracefully from the driver's seat, flipped it forward; now he leaned on the roof of the car, waiting patient as a Sunday father for his teenage son to slouch his way into his family saloon. Ken gazed up at the others through the open door, and the look on Aya's dour face had him fighting back laughter. This, he thought, should be good—the thought was comfortable and easy, warm as the blanket about him. For the first time in Christ knew how long Ken's mind felt like his own again, all his own, and the world about him shifted into a more familiar shape.

"This is my car," Aya pointed out.  
"Yeah, man," Youji said, "I know it's your car, that's the problem. If you wanted something with a back seat—"  
"At least it has a back seat," Aya retorted. "And a roof."  
Youji shook his head. "It has a shelf, Aya, and at least the Seven knows what it's doing. If you'd bought yourself a vaguely sensible car rather than this mid-life crisis on wheels…"  
"Everyone, please." Omi interrupted the familiar argument before it could really get started, which Ken thought a bit of a pity. "Aya-kun, Youji-kun is right. He's not going to fit in the back, his legs are too long. Can we please get going? We don't have time for this now."

He pushed gently past Youji, slipping neatly into the back of the car without waiting to see if Aya was following: Youji raised a brow in silent statement as the redhead clambered awkwardly in after Omi, scowling as if Youji had grown so tall simply to spite him.

"What happened to the target?" Ken asked, as Youji was reversing out of the clearing. "The French guy?"  
"He died," Aya said: nothing more.

Smiling, Ken closed his eyes. Home felt so much closer, hearing that.

**route 254**

Youji was driving too fast. How fast Ken didn't know; all he had was the draft from the open window that tangled his hair, rain on his cheeks and the awareness that they shouldn't have been moving this quickly, not even down roads as empty as this one.

There was nothing to see. Just shuttered storefronts and rain-washed streets, the weaving headlights of the handful of other cars that were out this late and, here and there, a pedestrian made reckless by the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the streets hovering suicidally on the curbside or darting, ready-or-not, across the road and to Hell with the traffic. Rain hammered tireless and tedious on the windows of the Porsche and, on the radio, Ayumi Hamasaki was singing _Boys and Girls_. It was kind of her, Ken thought, since he'd heard it about five hundred times already and all he wanted from the world right now was that it be exactly the same as it had always been.

He said, "I'm gonna throw up again—"

Ken just about managed to lean forward. If this had happened to any of the others while they were all riding in Aya's pretty little car, he thought he might have found it funny.

"Sorry," he said through a gasp, wiping at his mouth. It tasted bitter. "Jesus. Oh, _Jesus_ _Christ_. Sorry, Aya…"  
A grumpy voice from the back seat said, "You're paying the cleaning bill, Hidaka."  
"No he's not," Youji said. "Shut _up_, Fujimiya, it's just water and it's not his fault you bought a fucking stupid car."

Ken wanted to laugh at them, so he did.

**triage (priority i)**

He knew he was going to hospital because they told him he was, and rightly or wrongly Ken trusted his friends. Now, as Youji and Aya helped him from the car and to his feet (it hurt, good _Christ_ it hurt! and, for a moment, Ken wondered if he were about to pass out), Ken knew they had arrived simply because as he parked up Youji had said, _we're here_.

The streets were wet, shadow-haunted, sunk in incomplete silence: they felt no more real than a stage set. Funny, Ken had never been on stage before, not unless Nativity plays counted – third shepherd, age seven: a single line, _then let us to Bethlehem_, and he hadn't even got _that_ right…

There was a building there somewhere, but Ken barely saw it. All he could see, as Youji and Omi led him toward what must have been the emergency department, was light. Light, scaldingly bright, pouring from the windows and glass-fronted doors of a gaudy Christmas tree of a construction Omi assured him was Japan University Hospital, but could have been the headquarters of Mizuho Bank or Mitsukoshi department store for all he knew or cared about it. The light flooded over him, pulling him under. He drowned in it.

"Ow," Ken muttered. "_Fuck_."  
"Ken?"

Youji turned to look at him, glancing back over one shoulder in sudden concern, concern that was quickly chased away by open alarm, and Ken could hardly understand why that should have been so. Instinctively Youji caught him by the upper arms, as if he feared that Ken would fall; Ken cursed under his breath, tried to pull away, but Youji only gripped him the tighter. The look in the young man's eyes said this was the first time since Ken, in another country and another life, had left the _Koneko_ that he had actually seen him. It said that he didn't like what he saw.

"It's—" Ken broke off, coughing. Swallowed hard. "Just bright in here. I'm fine."  
"Fuck, Ken," Youji blurted out – Mother of God, Ken thought, he's only three years older than I am. "You look like shit."  
Ken slumped slightly, resting his brow against the curve of Youji's shoulder. Closed his eyes, just for a second. He said, "That good, huh? Sorry. I…"

Even as he spoke he wondered what he was apologizing for – but Youji had told him to watch himself, hadn't he? Now here Ken was in an ER lobby and his eyes were hurting so badly he could hardly bear to keep them open, and when he walked it was as if, like the girl in the fairytale, with every step he stepped on knives. _Be careful_…

"I fucked up."  
Youji sighed. "No you didn't."  
"But I—"  
"You didn't." Impatiently, Youji cut him off. "It wasn't you, this would've been one long fuck-up no matter what. They sent us after JohnClark, Ken, he'd have made any of us."

John Clark? But the target was – had been – French.

John Clark. Ken blinked, feeling himself starting to frown. He tried to think and it seemed far harder than it should have been; his mind was sluggish and unresponsive, and it grumbled at him like an old man woken from an afternoon doze for the sake of some small chore. Who was John Clark? Another dark beast, maybe. Some old _gaijin_ like the target, some scary hard bastard Persia had sent them after unprepared and barely warned, who'd nearly dragged the four of them to the grave with him. Maybe that was it – but surely he'd have remembered the guy, if he'd been that difficult to bring down?

"What?" Ken said. And, "Who's John Clark?"  
"What's a cultural attaché do?" Youji asked him. Then, when Ken still looked blank, he smiled. He might even have laughed. He said, "I'll explain later. Will you come on? You look fit to drop."

**triage (priority ii)**

Prophetic, as it turned out.

The room was too bright and too noisy, and crowded with strangers. There was a short queue at the reception desk already, headed by a compact, sturdy-looking young man in stained chef's whites with one hand wrapped in a gore-spattered tea towel: behind him a brace of girls waited to be seen, the taller of the pair leaning heavily on her friend's shoulder, glossy black hair cascading over her pale face as she whimpered drunkenly about her ankle. Wait here, Omi told him, and Ken smiled and said, _okay_.

He sat where Youji led him, watching vague-eyed and barely interested as Omi smiled sweet and genuine at the desk clerk and spun her some convenient lie. The smile had fallen as soon as Omi turned away, and the teenager sighed deeply as he walked over to them, raking one hand through his damp blond bangs as he murmured something about wait times and Friday-night drunks. It was a shock to realize that the weekend was just beginning: caught somewhere outside the hospital doors, it was an ordinary Saturday morning.

"How long?" Aya asked.  
Omi simply smiled helplessly. "At least he'll be a priority once he's been through triage," he said, "right?"

It really should have felt more personal.

Should have felt more real, but it didn't. It was only a hospital because Omi had told him it was, and Omi was a liar but Ken believed in him, utterly. The waiting-room, caught behind the veil of Ken's own exhaustion, looked every inch as movie-set fraudulent as it felt, the people who drifted about it vague and insubstantial as specters.

The strangest thing about them was that most of them hardly seemed ill at all; they might have been actors, feigning it for the cameras. A young woman was giving Youji a bleary smile which his friend, gazing down at his clasped hands and mud-spattered shoes, barely seemed to notice; the bedraggled-looking older man sat opposite, evidently whole, might have been there only to get out of the rain. A nurse, pallid and ghostlike in crisp, clinical white, slipped quietly into the waiting area and called for Katsumi Ando, but nobody seemed to pay her any heed and she padded away again as noiselessly as she had arrived.

"I feel sick," Ken said. He sounded surprised.  
Omi raised his head, and there was concern in his eyes. "Do you want me to ask for a kidney bowl, Ken-kun?"  
"No," Ken said. Then again, more decisively: "_No_. Where's the bathroom?"

Omi just looked dubiously at him; he didn't look as if he was going to help. Okay, Ken thought, fuck it, he'd do it the hard way then just like he always did. He blinked once, twice, as if hoping to clear his vision; he squinted into the too-bright haze about himself in search of a likely-looking door. Finally, after an embarrassingly long search, he found it set neatly into the wall behind him. Now all he needed was for it to be a real bathroom, not a sound stage or a costume cupboard or another playland forgery in wood and pasteboard and painted gauze…

Turning to Omi, Ken gave the boy a wide, reassuring smile and clambered ungracefully to his feet, but the ground seemed to lurch sickeningly beneath him, yawing like a ship in a storm. His vision blurred: a cheap fade to gray and then back to the same two seconds later, and by then Ken was already falling.

There was no time to cry out. There was barely time to raise his arms to protect his head. Ken simply fell, catching the side of his head a painful blow on something as he pitched forward, landing in a dazed and crumpled heap between two aisles of chairs. Then he merely lay still, eyes wide, staring in naked confusion at the sweep of the linoleum floor and the dozing tramp's scuffed and battered shoes, dizzy and breathless as a child at the end of a footrace. I'm okay, he wanted to say, but he couldn't find the breath to do it with. Really, I'm fine…

A girl shrieked, thin and pointless; Omi cried his name. The desk clerk, more practically, reached for the call bell.

"Is there a problem, Nanase-san?"  
"A patient's fallen."

And footsteps hurrying over to where he lay, and hands on his shoulders; a bespectacled woman, plain-faced and harried-looking, was trying to turn him onto his back. Ken wanted to reach up and push her glasses back up her nose before they fell off altogether, and as if that wasn't bad enough he still felt like he was going to throw up… he closed his eyes, letting the world slip sideways and fall away from him.

A heartbeat later and Ken opened his eyes again to the sensation of weightlessness, to arms about his body as he was lifted, carried. He wanted to protest – Jesus _Christ_, how many times? I'm _fin_e – but he couldn't seem to find his voice, could barely even force himself to open his eyes.

"Sir," a woman was saying, "I said we're _fetching_ a hoist, if you'd just _wait_ _a moment_—!"  
"Get a doctor." Aya cut her off. "He's waited long enough."

Gentle as a man carrying a sleeping child to bed, Youji placed Ken down on – he couldn't quite tell. Something soft, which yielded slightly beneath him. A gurney, he guessed; the target (Holy Mary mother of _God_) smiled at him from behind Aya's banked shoulder. Ken didn't want to lie there but Omi's hands were resting on his arms, gently pinning him down and Omi wouldn't let anything bad happen to him, Ken was sure of it. Omi knew what to do, he always did: _please_ _lie still, Ken-kun_, and it had to be the right thing to do, if Omi was the one telling him to do it.

If Omi was here he might still be okay. Ken had been given a pillow this time and a young woman, rendered utterly unremarkable by her prim white apron and nurse's cap, was covering him with a blanket, and he was far too dizzy and tired to fight, he hurt too much.

"Well," Youji was saying, one hand resting heavy and paternal on his shoulder, "well, Kenken, that's one way to jump a queue…"

Ken tilted his head back to find his friend's face, and smiled at him, and passed out.

**bones**

"How old would you say? I thought maybe sixteen…"  
"Try twenty. He's an adult."  
"Really? My Lord, this country. What's wrong with you people, don't you _age_?"

Even with his eyes closed, the light had stung them.

He couldn't move. There'd been agony and then there'd been darkness, and he had opened his eyes to find himself here: stripped bare and tied down, surrounded by familiar strangers with closed-off faces and the cold eyes of the casually cruel and if only, oh God if only he hadn't known quite what sins these men were guilty of. There had been questions – _who are you? Why did you follow me, who do you work for? _– then pain again, worse than before because it was so much more deliberate, and he hadn't even trusted himself to scream. _Your name, boy. Tell me your name._

All about them there were _things_, shapeless and ugly and glistening, unpleasant as organs shining moistly in the hollow of a pried-open chest, cradled by the bare ribs. Ken closed his eyes and concentrated on the pain. Don't speak, Hidaka. Don't say a word… Shadows on the retina: the artist bent to him, ran one heavy hand slowly along the length of his leg and Christ! if only it had been carnal. It would have been so much easier to bear if it had only been carnal.

Ken thought, I'm going to be sick. Thought, I'm scared. Oh, God, I'm _scared_…

(What's going to happen to me?)

"No good?" The target sounded disappointed.  
The artist shook his head. "Useless. He's an _athlete_, Gabriel! Remember the last one you dragged home? His bones were a wreck, and this one's got at least five years on him… see, look here."

He ran one finger down Ken's shin, tracing the faint, broken white line of an old operation scar. Ken flinched, and dreamed he was able to kick. He had too many scars already to remember where they all came from, but he recalled that one well enough. It had been a bike accident: he remembered a stifling seven-year-old afternoon, and burning asphalt and dust beneath skinned palms, insinuating itself into his cuts and making them smart. Remembered looking down at his aching leg to see blood and something white protruding through the skin, something he'd stared at in sickened fascination. He had said, _I think I hurt my leg_—

"He had this set. Nasty break, by the looks of it. And the other's no better, see? Right here, he's broken… Oh, I hate it when they're this active. No, it's useless, it won't work. Gabriel…" The artist stepped back. He turned away, gaze fixed on something Ken couldn't see. "I know you want him to talk but Gabriel, you can't seriously be suggesting we operate _now_? Don't you think the whole process is unpleasant enough as it is? No. No, it's just… just too _distasteful_, and to go through all that for something I couldn't even use… there's just no _point_. Find another way."

**triage (priority iii)**

Except Ken had been there once before and managed to survive, and what was dead couldn't hurt him any more.

There was light on his face, there were voices speaking low and murmurous and as he opened his eyes, gazing blearily up at his thousandth unfamiliar ceiling, Ken wondered how long he'd lost this time. Only a second had passed really, and yet he awoke lying on a clutter of pillows, propped up in a high, hard bed. The room he had opened his eyes on was bright and crisp and clean, the day caught beyond the single window showed gray and unremarkable and utterly, utterly beautiful. His thoughts were slow as Sunday afternoon, they had the vague, sluggish quality he had come to associate with the after-effects of anesthetic. He didn't hurt any more.

Hospital, then. Omi was there, by his side with one delicate hand resting atop Ken's own. Youji was there, stood by the door conferring with a doctor, tall and stern and movie-handsome. It must have been his voice Ken had heard.

He said, "Omi." He said, "Sorry. I… you were right. I'm not that good. Sorry."

It still hurt to talk, and Omi simply frowned at him as if he didn't understand. The look in his eyes said he had no idea what Ken was talking about and had decided, as Omi all too often did when confronted with something his mechanical mind couldn't rationalize away, to keep smiling and hope it wasn't important. Ken-kun, he said, how are you feeling?

"Fine." The lie was as instinctive as it was obvious. "I'm okay."  
"Oh, _Ken_-kun." Omi smiled, but the smile was weary, fraying about the edges; Ken caught himself wondering when the kid had last slept and, for a moment, he wished Omi weren't there. Stop worrying about me, he wanted to say. You've gotta rest, Omi. It's no good us _both_ feeling like shit… "You don't always have to be… I mean, you know it's okay to _not_ be okay sometimes too, right?"  
"I'm fine," Ken whispered, "honest," but there was a catch in his voice and he couldn't seem to meet his friend's eyes. He couldn't even lie to himself.

And why did it matter, anyway? Omi was going to kill him, if not today then soon. He'd promised, after all—

"Would you like some water, Ken-kun?" Omi said sudden and awkward, and perhaps he had spoken only to fill the heavy silence. Ken flinched at the sound of his voice. Hospital, then: he had, he realized, been listening for the sigh of the pump. "They said," the teenager added, as if by way of an explanation, "you needed to start drinking again."

He didn't wait for a reply, just reached for a pitcher of water and bowed his head to fill a scratched, cloudy plastic tumbler. What, Ken wondered, is wrong with this picture?

Omi had looked so much better before. He had been far more himself when, lost in darkness, he'd gazed at Ken as if he were a curiosity and promised he would help him find death. This Omi was pale and bone-weary, his liar's eyes full of concern and that same horrifyingly impersonal compassion he might show to a tearful teenage girl who was nothing to him save as an innocent and a victim, compassion that was all the more terrible for being wholly unfeigned. Omi had promised to kill him and yet here he was sat by Ken's bedside holding out a plastic cup full of chalky, tepid water, because it was all he could think of to give.

"Here," Omi said. "Don't worry, they said you shouldn't be sick again."

Of course, his hands didn't work right. It hurt even to lift them, and his fingers wouldn't move properly. His left wrist was in plaster, the fingers of his right hand clumsily splinted, his nails split and broken to the quick. Wincing, Ken reached for the cup all the same, caught it clumsily between both hands. Even then he might still have been okay if it hadn't been for the grime beneath what remained of his nails. The breath caught in his throat, and he gagged. If his stomach hadn't been empty Ken thought he might have thrown up.

Some nightmares didn't have the grace to end just because you'd woken up. Only that, only dirt from a forest floor trapped beneath his nails – and it was real and hideous and utterly insupportable. Lost in stifling darkness, with nothing to cling to but the wheeze of an air pump and broken-record phrases from half-forgotten prayers, Ken lay still and silent and thought about fear. _You're going to talk_, the target said, and all he could do was agree…

He dropped the glass.

"Ken-kun?" Omi started forward, quick and anxious."Ken-kun, are you all—!"

Omi's hand was on his arm, and Ken hid his face in the crook of his friend's shoulder and clung to him like a child, and he wept. The cup clattered to the floor.

**a smile without a cat**

"I thought I told you to fuck off."

Some things never leave you, no matter how much you wish they would. A bad penny to the end, there was Kase, showing up predictable as Sapporo snow. Ken, gazing out of the window at an unremarkable Tokyo Saturday, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips, knew it without having to so much as glance around: wherever he went there was Kase, a shadow caught on the edge of sight, forever.

"I told you I can't." His friend's voice was little more than a whisper. Soft as a sigh, as a spring breeze tousling the long grass. "I'm you. I'll always be here, you know that."  
Ken closed his eyes for a moment; he heard himself laugh, a short, unpleasant chuckle that felt strange on his lips and bitter to the taste. "Yeah, I know. You said that before. You and dad and Saint Joseph and all the rest of them. You'll go away when I'm dead, and I'm not that. Not me, Kase. Not me."  
"Hah. Keep telling yourself that. You've got to die someday, and when you do—"  
"Sure. Everything dies sooner or later. We'll meet again, Kase."

Raising his head, Ken searched for his friend's face, but Kase was nowhere to be seen: it wasn't even a surprise. Kase was everywhere and he was nowhere, a phantom of the mind no amount of prayer or visits to priests would exorcise.

Kase was merely another guilt-born phantom, exactly like all the rest of them. Ken thought he could cope with that.

"We'll meet again," he said, "and that's a promise. But for now you'll have to wait."

**under siege**

"Ken," said Youji. "Kenken, look at me. No, at _me_, Ken. The doctor wants to talk to you. You okay with that?"  
Ken blinked slowly; slowly, he nodded. He said, "Youji, who's John Clark?"  
"You don't have to worry about him, Ken. He's just a guy in a movie. Will you be okay to talk to the doctor? They're kind of worried about your injuries."

Ken knew it for a warning.

This doctor looked like the target too, which was to say like nothing very much. He was an older man, in his early fifties if Ken had to put an age to him, neatly turned out in a smart pinstripe suit and a tie his wife had clearly chosen to match it. He could have been anyone or no one, just another blameless, business-suited nonentity, looking far more like an aging section chief than anyone's idea of a doctor.

"Good afternoon. I'm Doctor Saionji, I'm the consultant in charge of your case. Is it all right if I sit down?"

Of course it was all right by Ken. The doctor draw up a chair and sat down heavily, sighing as he took the weight off his feet, and Ken smiled at him, a polite shopkeeper's smile. He said, "Can I help you?" Falling back on rote.

(For what was this if not another interrogation?)

The doctor smiled. Yesterday – well last week, at any rate – Ken might have thought he looked kind. "Well, perhaps you can. The young men who brought you in – how do you know them?"  
"I'm a florist," Ken said. "We sell flowers."  
"So you all work together?"  
"We sell flowers."  
"Very well. Now, your… colleagues told us you all went drinking in Sayama, and that you had an accident. Now, I may be mistaken but from what I know of your condition when they brought you in—" He broke off. Looked away, talking to the sheaf of paperwork he held. "Well, I find it hard to believe that's true, son. In my experience your kind of injuries are very rarely found in accident victims… do you think you could tell me how you were hurt?"

No. No, he couldn't. There was nothing he could tell this man. Nothing except the truth, and how could Ken offer him that when the truth would damn them all?

So he said only, "What?"  
"How did you come to be hurt?" The doctor asked again. Gently, he spoke so gently. "Please try not to worry. It's quite safe to speak freely here. We can see to it that nothing else happens to you."  
"It wasn't them!" And he'd spoken too soon, the denial was too emphatic. "I got lost," he said, "I got lost in the woods and they found me and I thought they'd never come but they did, they found me. I was lost, it wasn't them, I swear to God it wasn't."  
The doctor frowned slightly. He said, and he sounded as gentle as ever, "Son, I don't wish to accuse your friends of anything. They've clearly been very worried about you and no doubt they're glad you weren't worse hurt. I'm just concerned that their story doesn't add up."  
"I was lost," Ken said again, his voice little more than a whisper. "I was lost."

**their blood shall be upon them**

The target was dead. Ken knew he was dead because Aya had told him and Aya didn't lie without good reason, but the target hadn't worked alone. Nobody had mentioned the other one, the artist, a skinny nonentity not much taller than Ken himself was. There'd been a man with them back in the forest – hadn't there? There had been a forest, right? The clothes they had given him, damp and oversized, smelling of alcohol and aftershave and someone else's stale terror, had to have come from somewhere.

Ken wondered what had happened to their owner. He wondered why it was nobody had told him _that_.

**debrief**

"I'd have talked," Ken heard himself saying. "I'd have told them anything they wanted, if they'd come back."  
"But you didn't," Omi said, and it was almost as if he had never known the truth at all. You're not that good, none of us are… he had _said_ it, hadn't he? "You didn't talk, Ken-kun. It's okay."  
"But I _would_ have done." Don't you get it? "I'd have told them everything!"

It seemed strange it should have hurt so much yet there it was: the worst thing of all. It hurt far more than remembering the indignities that had been forced upon him, more than the darkness and the cold and the all-consuming terror. They would have offered him an ending (_now, child, is there anything you'd like to tell me?_)and for all that Ken would have wept and hated himself for it, he knew that he would have taken it. He wouldn't even have had to think about it: worse, this time it had been different. Just this once, but once was all it needed and already it was far more than he deserved. His friends had saved his life, for no reason other than a replacement wouldn't cut it. They had wanted _him_ back.

They had come for him when he thought nobody would, they brought him water and bandaged his wounds, they held him when he cried and Ken would have betrayed them all for nothing more than a quick death.

We sell flowers. I'll show you.

(Just don't put me back there.)

There was blood on the tile and somewhere he couldn't see a man was screaming, a man he had told himself he would endure anything to protect. They would have died, all of them, and it would have been all his fault…

Ken knew that he would have talked, and that the only thing that had kept him from it was sheer dumb luck – the one thing he had told himself was utterly out of the question, the million-to-one shot that was rescue. He'd prayed for death before that. Now Omi sat and gazed at him, his child's face grave and his eyes full of compassion, and told him that he had said nothing after all, and everything was all right. From Omi he believed it, but Omi was a liar.

**closing time**

The newcomer wasn't a doctor. She – a dark, slender, quietly good-looking specimen – had the narrow-framed smart-girl glasses, the messy bun and the slightly distracted expression, but there was something the matter with her eyes. The rest of her was note-perfect, but her eyes were too young to match. She wasn't a nurse, either: she wore no uniform, she didn't look careworn enough. She was a liar too, but Ken trusted her because Omi had told him he ought to and that she, whoever she was, would see he got out of here.

_I want to go home_, he had said.  
Ken had expected to be told not to be so silly. Instead, Omi had smiled at him. He said_, I'll figure something out._

She wasn't a doctor and she wasn't a nurse, but she had given Ken a tired but genuine smile and a glass of water and when she told him to drink it, obediently he had. Maybe, if he'd thought about it, he might have thought it tasted odd.

He drank it anyway. Doctor's orders. The woman smiled and took the glass and left him, slipping quietly out and into the corridor. Ken listened to the steady _tick, tick_ of her heels against the linoleum as she hurried away and wondered what would happen when they stopped, and then why it mattered. He wondered where she was going and why she was there at all, playing at doctors. How good they all were at looking harmless.

In time, he realized he was tired. Something was insisting he wanted to close his eyes, so he did. Not long now, Omi said quietly. Just hang in there, Ken-kun…

But falling asleep would be so easy, and Ken was sick of fighting.

(_This is a sedative—_)

It should have frightened him – but, caught somewhere far beyond fear, Ken slept all the same. There didn't seem any point in struggling. Omi and the others would do their best; he could ask no more. He let himself drift, barely bothering to open his eyes when he felt himself being jostled, lifted from his bed – somewhere caught on the edge of hearing he could hear Omi querulously demanding… Ken didn't know what and, in truth, he hardly cared. He let himself slip back into dreamless, narcotized sleep, and didn't wake again until the slamming of a car door jolted him from it.

"Careful," Omi was saying, "careful, Youji-kun. Aya-kun, can you get an IV stand? Thanks."

Both orders, of course.

There was something shameful and wrong about being carried carefully back to his own bed by a man who was even more exhausted and bone-weary than he was. Youji must have known it, because he let Ken struggle and curse and demand he put him down _now_ without a word. All the better to maintain the fiction he could have done it himself, if his overanxious friends had only let him try—

It felt strange to be back in his room again, though Ken knew full well there was no reason he should feel that way. It was just as he had left it: the closet door he hadn't quite closed on his way out swinging in the evening breeze, a forgotten sweater slung carelessly over the back of a chair, his bed – nobody gave a damn if Ken left his bedsheets in a tangled mess any more, but old habits died hard – inexpertly made and quite unslept-in. Youji placed him cautiously on the bed, and grinned when Ken aimed a clumsy blow at his face.

"You're a bastard, Kudou," Ken muttered. "A total _bastard_."  
Youji just laughed. "Love you too."

It wasn't that Ken couldn't help himself, Youji was just an ass and wouldn't let him—that much established, Ken let his friend help him into his pajamas, draw back the sheets and settle him into bed. He could have done it easily any time, it was just quicker and simpler to let Youji fuss…

_I'm fine_, Ken told him. And, _I can do it myself._

And Youji didn't believe him but that didn't matter a bit, because Ken hadn't bought it either.

**looking glass world**

A soul could get lost in Wonderland.

The woods were gone, and there were no more angels. There was only Ken, dressed in his pajamas, stranded in the shadows and too confused to think about fear. Darkness huddled close about him, thick as a shroud and heavy as the earth that covered him—and yet the shadows could not touch him, and he knew he would rise again. There was no sun and yet he stood in sunlight, the wind catching the flimsy cotton of his clothing and tugging gently at his tangled hair. His hands and his feet were bandaged – just bandaged, not taped and splinted, and immobilized in plaster.

You're not real, he thought.

Just for a moment, he wondered whose dream this was—

Ken knew what had happened to the artist now. He supposed in some way he had always known: the answer, elegant in its simplicity, had been there all along, a matter of scores settled and tables terrifyingly turned. Weiss wouldn't even have to worry about disposing the body…

The artist had been with them in the forest, but he had never left. His screams hadn't stopped, they simply faded away, choked by the weight of damp earth: then there had been Omi, soaked to the skin, dirt on his hands and blood on his shirt, and his face had all the terrible self-assured serenity as the face of an avenging angel. Never forgive. In Omi's eyes such a punishment might have seemed just, even almost poetic: now Ken, left to take his place, gazed down at an ordinary-looking young man, his frightened eyes wide open, lying alone and terribly hurt and knew that Omi had been wrong. It could never be that.

This wasn't justice. It was merely revenge. The artist could never have deserved what was done to him, no matter what his sins. No man should have to die like that, alone in the darkness, with nothing to hold onto but the memories of his sins and the silence in his own head, and nothing to wait for but death…

He knelt, resting his hands in his lap, and closed his eyes. The last thing he wanted was to have to watch, but not to see felt like shame. His friends had done this, and in his name. The least he could do was face up to it.

"I'm sorry," Ken said. And, "You didn't deserve this. It's my fault. I'm sorry."

And, leaning forward, he tried to reach out and touch him, then hesitated, the fingertips of one shaking hand barely brushing against the artist's arm, touching skin as chill and clammy as the skin of a corpse so gently that he could barely tell if he felt anything at all. He shouldn't have wanted to comfort this man, but some things nobody deserved to have to endure merely to be allowed to find death at the end of it. Who, oh who would think to look for the artist _there_?

"Why did you do it?" he asked. He let his hand fall. "They were children."

The artist shuddered and turned away, but the artist was Ken too and the _why_ of it would change nothing.

"I would have stopped him," Ken told him. "If he'd told me. I wouldn't have let him do this, I—He didn't _tell_ me."  
All the artist asked was, "What's going to happen to me?" Already his voice sounded hoarse. He must have been screaming.  
Ken looked away, down at his bandaged hands, fingers curling in the flimsy fabric of his pajama top. "I don't know," he admitted. "I… can't remember. There's voices, and… and I guess it's personal. I guess it's what you bring down with you. You'll probably see the kids. The first one, anyway. Don't expect him to understand."  
"What did you see?"

Ken just shook his head: he couldn't answer that one either. Not to have it make sense, anyway. He'd seen his friends, he'd seen his father – and yet that hadn't been it at all. It was strange, but he felt himself starting to smile.

"You wouldn't get it," he said. "Even if I told you, it wouldn't—you'd be all, _why is that so bad_? I _told_ you, it's personal, it's—" He broke off. Leaned forward slightly, as if he were confiding a secret. "It's you," he said. "Whatever you see, it's all you."  
"That doesn't make sense," the artist whispered.  
"It will." It wasn't a threat, merely an observation. "Look, it… well, whatever you see, it kinda comes out wrong. You can only be yourself, right? And if you're anywhere near as bad as I am, that's gonna be fucking horrible to watch."

The artist trembled, he closed his eyes. Something in his expression told Ken he understood him perfectly. "Can you kill me?"

"I'm sorry," Ken told him. "I would if I could."

Before he died, this man would be forced to endure a foretaste of Hell, a Hell that was far worse than anything the ancients could have dreamed up because it was so much more horribly personal. He would suffer in ways he couldn't even comprehend yet. It would get so much worse for him before God had the grace to offer him an exit and it would be wrong of Ken to walk away now, terribly so—but he was getting to his feet, he was turning away. Bad enough living it once. He couldn't go through it again, not even at second hand. He just _couldn't_.

The artist was looking at him. Even with his back turned, Ken could feel the weight of his gaze. "Will you be back?"  
And Ken said, "No."

He opened his eyes and there was nothing.

**it grows in darkness**

One of Ken's biggest secrets was that had been scared of the dark until he was almost eleven. Nine years down the line, he gazed wide-eyed into unbroken shadow and heard himself bite back a scream.

It was too dark. Far too dark and far too quiet: there was nothing for him to hold onto. Just the darkness before his eyes and the sound of his own breathing, too fast and too shallow, and, so far off he hardly knew whether or not he should believe in it, a soft, grumbling purr that could have been a thousand and one different things and probably wasn't even there at all… He was alone. Ken was trapped in the dark and he was all alone.

We sell flowers, he was thinking, the phrase repeating like a snatch of a half-forgotten prayer. God in Heaven, we sell flowers. _The Lord is my shepherd_—

There were hands snatching at his shoulders, there was a body bending to his and gathering him to their chest: Ken felt his muscles tense; for a single desperate moment he forgot to breathe. He gasped, a curse caught and carried on his breath; he was fighting, frantic and desperate, to break free of the snare that was the stranger's arms, sending his attacker sprawling with a single violent shove that left his hands throbbing painfully and his arms aching. Stay away, God damn you. Oh Christ, oh Jesus just _stay back!_

"Ken," someone was shouting, a million miles distant. "_Ken_!"

Then light, as if it really were that simple.

**wounds within**

And it was only Youji after all. Youji, his hair tumbled as if he had been sleeping, half-kneeling on the edge of his bed with one hand resting on the switch of his bedside light. Youji who, by the look in his weary green eyes, was barely less shaken and afraid than he was – but he was solid and real and there, and Ken clung to him as if he were driftwood.

"Youji," Ken said. Then, "Mother of God, _Youji_."

He was trembling, his unsplinted fingers digging into his friend's shoulders so firmly Youji must have been able to tell that Ken was frightened that he would vanish completely if he were to let go, even if it were only for a second. For a moment he simply sat there, hands by his sides, and let Ken cling to him like a child woken from a nightmare, before tentatively wrapping his arms about his friend's body and pulling him close. Shivering, Ken pressed closer, holding Youji so tightly it must have hurt. Please be real, the boy's taut, desperate embrace was saying. Please, oh please, just tell me you're really there…

"I was so fucking _scared_, Youji!"  
"It's okay," Youji said, because what else could he say to him? "You're at home. You're safe."  
"I thought I was going to die," Ken said, and even his voice shook. "Oh Christ, I… I was so scared, I _really thought_ I was going to _die_—"  
"It's okay, Kenken," Youji whispered. "It's gonna be okay."

**the mystery of faith**

It ended where it had began: it ended with a woman, standing calm and dour in a shadow-haunted room. There'd been a mission and a target, smiling and unremarkable, and there'd been a simple mistake but missions, like stories, had to come to an end somehow. All things considered, Ken Hidaka thought it could have been a lot worse.

Ken was hurting and he was frightened, shaken to the core, but he was home and he was safe and they had come for him after all. Close the book here and it was almost a happy ending…

"I'm sorry," said Manx.

Something had changed since he had seen her last. For all the makeup and the neat little suit she looked somehow different. She looked older, worn and strangely diminished: she was, for now at least, only human after all. She wasn't Manx of Kritiker any more, only a woman who had been taxed – God knew why: Ken was sure it would have nothing to do with him, a missing agent who could be replaced at a snap of the fingers – almost to the limit of her endurance. Manx simply looked tired, and when she spoke her voice had been as weary as her gaze. _I'm sorry_, she said.

Here and now, he could almost believe that she meant it.

Propped up against his pillows, idly fidgeting with the IV tube that snaked across the sheets, Ken looked up at her and managed a small smile.

"Yeah, Manx," he said quietly. "Me too."

Manx frowned and glanced briefly over at Youji, stood slouched against the wall with his arms folded and a cigarette slow-burning its way to extinction between his lips, raising one elegant eyebrow in a silent query. The look on her face said she didn't understand a word of it, and she sighed slightly when Youji simply shrugged.

"No, Siberian," she said. Tired, she sounded so tired of it all. "There was an intelligence failure which Kritiker must take sole responsibility for and which I assure you—assure all of you will never happen again."  
"But I'd have told him everything."  
"So would any of us," she said simply, "under the right pressure. He was a spy, Ken."

John Clark, huh? The saddest thing about it was it wasn't even a surprise. Ken just sighed, turning away to gaze out of his window at another unremarkable Tokyo night – the lights of the cars prowling along rain-smeared streets, a damp cat darting into an alleyway, a young man at a bus stop eating soba noodles from the carton, a knot of stranded girls, one holding her handbag over her head, another wailing about the rainwater ruining her brand new boots. Saturday night declared business as usual and Manx stepped back from his bedside, the level, dispassionate look slipping back into eyes that could have been pretty, if only they hadn't been so cold.

"I owe you an apology as well, Manx," Youji said into the silence. "I shouldn't have shouted. I'm very sorry."  
Manx dismissed it with a wave of the hand. "There's no need for that."  
"Manx." Omi, waiting quietly in the doorway clutching a sheaf of paper and looking for all the world like a boy waiting to hand in an assignment to a teacher who had far more on her mind than marking, broke his silence. "About the report. I've been checking police records but I can't find anything about Morin or Nakajima. It doesn't look like either of them have been missed yet, so—"  
"It can wait," Manx said. "I'll want it in by Wednesday afternoon. We'll need a copy of Siberian's medical records, let Birman know if you run into difficulties. Siberian…" She granted Ken a rare smile which had him flushing awkwardly and pretending a fascination he didn't feel with his bedsheets. "Get some rest. We're standing you down until you're fit for duty again."

And Manx picked up her bag and left, ushering Omi out before her and, careful as a night nurse slipping from the room of her sleeping patient, quietly closing the door behind them. Youji – and somehow it didn't feel strange at all – Youji stayed, flipping his cigarette through the open window behind Ken's couch, then settling back down into the chair he had dragged by the bed. There was a novel on the floor, and he bent to retrieve it. Here they were and Youji was reading about James fucking Bond, _again_. You couldn't make it up.

"It's too quiet in here," Ken said.  
Youji put down his book. "I'll turn on the radio."

That was all there was, for a time. The lazy patter of rain on the window and the radio talking to itself in the corner, girl after interchangeable girl quietly singing pretty nonsense about love, and Youji sat in the chair by the bed gazing at Ken over the banked pages of a battered novel pretending to read about spies, as if they hadn't all heard quite enough from _them_ to last a lifetime. Ken gave him a funny look and watched the raindrops crawling down the glass, and the steady pulse of the crowds on the streets.

"Youji," Ken asked, after a time he never counted had slipped past, "why are you still here?"  
Youji just smiled. Said, "You've been alone long enough. It's not the same without you, kiddo, you know that?"  
"Huh? What the Hell does that mean?"  
"You're an idiot, Kenken," Youji said with a chuckle. "Get some sleep, okay?"

Okay. With Youji's arm braced about his shoulders, Ken sat forward to let his friend sort out his pillows and, when Youji tugged the bedsheets down to stop them from tangling about his legs as he lay down, he shivered in the breeze from the open windows. It would be cold outside, as cold as the grave – he caught clumsily at the blanket as it was drawn back over him, pulling it more closely about himself. Fighting against pain and his own stiff limbs, Ken winced as Youji's fingers brushed against his bruises. Even with the painkillers, it hurt to move.

Youji didn't ask about the light, or about the radio. He just sat back down, the book held loosely in his hand, smiling as if there were nowhere else in the world that he would rather be – not the arms of a woman, not even his own bed. Ken had been alone long enough, and all Youji wanted was to see that he wasn't any more.

"You should go," Ken said. He said, though he knew it wasn't true and wouldn't be true for a long time to come, "I'll be fine by myself."  
Youji didn't move. He said, "I know, but right now I'd rather you didn't have to be."  
"Honest, I'm _okay_. You gotta sleep too, I—"  
"Ken." Youji cut him off. "Please. Just humor me, okay?"

(It had been hard on Youji too, and on them all. Ken knew he'd never understand how hard it must have been.)

It was silly and it was childish to refuse to admit he might need this: Ken knew it but he didn't care. All that mattered was that now it was Youji's idea, and now it felt all right that he should stay.

Ken fought to free one hand from the bedsheets, and reached out to rest it upon Youji's bare wrist. It hurt when Youji's warm, callused fingers closed gently about his own, it left him flinching and catching his breath, but what was pain in the face of the knowledge that he was no longer alone? His friends had come for him because they cared, and he was safe and he was warm and he was going to get better—Ken was hurting, he was frightened and shaken to the core, and he couldn't remember ever feeling more alive. He was going to live, and he was going to be okay.

"Thank you," Ken whispered.

And, when he was recovered, he would ask Youji to drive him out of the city and they would find an empty field, grass whispering in the wind, and he would lie on his back, and close his eyes, and feel the sun on his face.

_-ende-_


End file.
